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4 Erasmus L. Rev. 1 (2011)

handle is hein.journals/erasmus4 and id is 1 raw text is: INTRODUCTION: THE FOUNDATIONS OF A EUROPEAN LEGAL METHOD Sanne Taekema The methods of legal scholarship today are not self-evident. There are various reasons for the growing self-consciousness of legal scholars about their methodology. One of these is the internationalisation of legal research, which among other things has generated a change in the culture of legal publication towards peer-reviewed journals with stricter norms for methodological justification. Another reason is the weakening link between academic legal scholarship and national legal practice, which raises questions about the identity of legal scholarship as something distinct from legal practice and the extent to which methods define legal scholarship. A third reason is the popularity of interdisciplinary research in law, which gives lawyers reason to compare their own methods to those of other disciplines. In many respects, the debate on legal method takes its cue from American debates about the character of legal research and the directions to be taken. This is visible, for instance, in the call for interdisciplinary research and in the still growing popularity of law and economics, both of which started in the American academic world. However, there are also distinctly European developments, many of which we can connect to the Europeanisation of law in the context of the European Union. The expansion of the European Union has renewed the interest in the legal cultures of European countries, giving rise to comparative law research in the European context. In private law, ambitious projects abound proposing, for instance, pan-European legal norms of contract law.1 These themes involve exploring the differences and similarities in European legal systems and their cultural contexts. In this issue of Erasmus Law Review, we take a step back from the study of the legal norms to look at European legal scholarship. The methods of legal scholarship are an underlying factor influencing the diversity of developments of legal systems. The divide between common law and civil law is not only visible in the particularities of the law in practice, but also in differing methodological approaches. For some comparative law scholars, the different style or mentalitJ of the common law and civil law approach is reason to be sceptical of all attempts to integrate law in Europe.2 The idea of this issue is to approach the possibility of a common European legal method with an open mind, with no prior commitment to either belief or scepticism. To that end, we present general reflections on the history and present character of European legal scholarship. The central aim of the issue is the identification of common strands in the heritage of European legal scholarship that could serve as starting points for a common legal method in Europe. This question is approached from two angles, namely by studying the historical development of legal scholarship in Europe and by studying the philosophical basis of legal method. Looking at legal method from a historical perspective, the acknowledged common thread of legal scholarship in Europe is the study of Roman law. In his contribution, Tammo Wallinga takes this as his starting point. However, he argues that Roman law was not the only common core: canon law was a second important component of legal scholarship that served to develop general legal concepts, accompanied by moral theology and the idea of natural law. Wallinga shows how legal scholarship in the universities on the European continent developed as a series of attempts at systematising law, mainly by applying logical and critical methods to the texts of the Corpus Juris Civilis and Corpus Juris Canonici, but also by criticising Roman law with the help of natural law principles. 1 See, for instance, the EU Commission's Green Paper of 1 July 2010 on policy options for progress towards a European Contract Law for consumers and businesses, COM (2010) 348. 2 Pierre Legrand, 'Against a European Civil Code' (1997) 60(1) The Modern Law Review 44 at 45. www.erasmuslawreview.nl Erasmus Law Review, Volume 4, Issue 1 (2011) © SANNE TAEKEMA

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