Law & Society Blog

“In fact, there can be at least two sciences of law,” writes Davis Nelson. “Call these two sciences, for lack of better names, “law in action” and “academic law.”
While I agree that there may be two or more such sciences, I doubt that either would be law.
According to Nelson, Law in Action “would cover all […]

Davis Nelson of the Legal Philosophy Blog wrote a reply critical of my conclusions in Is law a Science. Here is his comment:
Your conclusion is unduly pessimistic for a number of reasons. In fact, there can be at least two sciences of law (see below). But you may need to reevaluate your glorification and adulation […]

Most things can be sold, for example, cars, art, services, sperm, and life insurance; other cannot, such as life, people, and votes. What can and what cannot be sold has been highly contingent in history and geography. Demarcating the line between tradable and non-tradable goods is the goal of the commodification debate. In The Price […]

The driving force of that change, the enabling faculty, was the marriage of mathematics with empiricism, that is, scientific reasoning as explored by Galileo Galilei, Rene Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Isaac Newton and others and as described by Karl Popper and the critical rationalists, taking into account the occasional dead end and a series of turf wars among an ever more highly specialized scientific community, which accounts for much of what Thomas Kuhn describes in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”Hold on,” says the formalist, “mathematics and empiricism have been part and parcel of the philosophical discourse ever since before Plato…. The defining discovery of Greek philosophy was to provide a general, ontological explanation for the ubiquitous experience of change and invariance (some things change, others don’t), that is, the discovery of matter and form, of the empirical world and the world of ideas, of body and soul. Mathematics, in particular geometry and early number theory (most of which we would see as numerology today), had immediately been identified as part of the ideal, unchanging world, whereas empiricism was the method of choice to learn about our changing environment.