New Book on Objectivity in Law and Legal Reasoning

Every five years or so legal theorists from Belgium and the Netherlands meet with their colleagues from the Scandinavian countries. This is a tradition that started in the early 1980’s at the initiative of Mark van Hoecke who rightly felt that the Belgian, Dutch and Nordic legal theorists have a lot in common that is worth discussing. I have had the pleasure myself of participating in the last three meetings. They were held at the University of Turku in 1998, at Maastricht University in 2002 and – after an interval of almost ten years – at the University of Lapland in 2011.

Last week the book based on the 2012 conference was published by Hart Publishing under the title Objectivity in Law and Legal Reasoning. It was edited by Jaakko Husa and Mark Van Hoecke and offers a very welcome coherent set of contributions on objectivity in law and legal reasoning. This is the description of the book by the publisher:

‘Legal theorists consider their discipline as an objective endeavour in line with other fields of science. Objectivity in science is generally regarded as a fundamental condition, informing how science should be practised and how truths may be found. Objective scientists venture to uncover empirical truths about the world and ought to eliminate personal biases, prior commitments and emotional involvement. However, legal theorists are inevitably bound up with a given legal culture. Consequently, their scholarly work derives at least in part from this environment and their subtle interaction with it. This book questions critically, in novel ways and from various perspectives, the possibilities of objectivity of legal theory in the twenty-first century. It transpires that legal theory is unavoidably confronted with varying conceptions of law, underlying ideologies, approaches to legal method, argumentation and discourse etc, which limit the possibilities of ‘objectivity’ in law and in legal reasoning. The authors of this book reveal some of these underlying notions and discuss their consequences for legal theory.’

Hart Publishing makes a special offer to the readers of the MEPLI blog. They get a 20% discount on the price of £40 / €52. If you would like to place an order you can do so through the Hart Publishing website. To receive the discount please mention ref: ‘MEPLBLOG’ in the special instructions field.