Interdisciplinary Research in Jurisprudence and Constitutionalism

Under the influence of a narrowly understood scientific legal positivism, jurisprudence has neglected interdisciplinary research for a long time. However, today there are strong practical and scholarly reasons for an interdisciplinary analysis of law triggered, e.g., by bioethics, life sciences, economics and ecology. And yet the very subject matter of law shimmering between normativity and descriptivity seems to resist all attempts to be taken in by common enterprises across disciplines: How then is the necessary interdisciplinary research in jurisprudence possible without abandoning its core, legal dogmatics? This question was discussed at a special working group during the IVR-World Congress in Cracow. The papers have been polished and updated for publication. The volume falls into two parts: One is directed at the basic conceptual and institutional questions of interdisciplinary research in jurisprudence; the other one concentrates on one fruitful and highly important field of interdisciplinary research, constitutionalism. The volume brings together a truly international and in itself interdisciplinary group of experts in the field, from Finland to Brazil and from Spain to Greece.

Stephan Kirste, holds a chair for legal and social philosophy at the University of Salzburg, Austria. His research covers all fields of legal philosophy, from history of legal philosophy, theory of jurisprudence and its interdisciplinarity, theory of law (esp. law and time, legal persons) to the ethics of law (theory of justice, human dignity, freedom, human rights, democracy).