Social Science Analysis As A Method Of Law

The controversy surrounding the ’social science law’ has been going on for many years,and most of the critics of it have presupposed a position of perspective separation,wrongly limiting social science law to an ’external point’ of legal research,separating it from the work of interpreting the law and normative evaluation.The task of this article is to clarify these issues and to show how an internal point on law and social science is possible.The first chapter focuses on what it means to have an internal point on social science law by explaining the concepts of social science law and internal and external point.The concept of social science law has always been inappropriately used by scholars in related discussions,and has been given many connotations that do not themselves carry a theoretical dimension to law.The original meaning of social science law is simply the application of social science methods to the study of law.The social science method of analysis can be used not only as an ’external point’ to study the interaction between law and extra-legal factors,but also as an ’internal point’ to study the content and meaning of the law itself and to engage in the interpretation of legal propositions.In this regard,critics have often understood the jurisprudential view of social science law as a ’substitutionism’ that attempts to replace the requirements of the law itself with various extra-legal criteria,risking the dismantling of normativity and undermining the rule of law.A ’ Law and Social Science Study with the Internal Point of View ’,on the other hand,means that the application of a social science approach to the construction of legal propositions in judicial decisions does not give rise to the problems alleged by the ’substitutionism’.The second chapter shows how social science law achieves an ’internal point’ as a legal method.In reality,the establishment of normative claims cannot be accomplished through strict deductive reasoning.The traditional legal methodology is not a positive method of obtaining a substantive solution,but rather an ex post facto process of rational reconstruction,in which the techniques of reflect on normative claims that are actually found on the basis of various other factors.The traditional legal methodology,however,is seriously lacking in substantive knowledge of these other factors and is unable to help when it comes to substantive issues,as opposed to social science law,which can be involved in the construction of legal propositions at the point of legal discovery,providing decision-makers with substantive access to the law and enhancing the science of adjudicative solutions.The two sides of the coin,discovery and argumentation,constitute the overall administration of the law,and this is the ideal model of cooperation between social science law and legal Dogmatics.The third chapter shows how the social science approach is specifically applied as a legal method,the key to which is the clarification of the misunderstandings suffered by the consequential approach.Social science analysis can be used as a first-order method for directly explaining the content of legal interpretations and as a second-order method for weighing conflicts between interpretations using consequential approach.Many scholars have rejected the viability of consequential approach as an integrated second-order method of interpretation,either because it presupposes a ’substitutionism’perspective,that social science law seeks to replace or even eliminate value judgments with consequential approach,or that consequential approach represent some extra-legal standard that leads to unlawful adjudication.In fact,the ’substitutionism’ critique completely deviates from the theoretical aims and concerns of the consequential approach.There are varying degrees of misunderstanding on a range of issues such as the scope of consideration of consequences,the purpose of quantification,the way in which comparisons are made,and the attitude towards different values.The maximisation criterion in the sense of welfare economics is normative only in terms of individual welfare,and rejects an ’essentialist’ claim that is completely divorced from empirical preferences and is not related to ’utilitarianism’ as understood by many critics.