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1 Legisprudence iii (2007)

handle is hein.journals/legisp1 and id is 1 raw text is: EDITORS' PREFACE Luc J Wintgens and Jaap Hage Legisprudence has a short history, but a long tradition. Many philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle on, have had their word on legislation. From Tacitus to Montesquieu, complaints about legislative quality were heard. However, the legal and political philosophy that guides current legal thinking has never embraced a systematic, theoretical study of legislation,. The findings of legal theory are still, to a large extent, premised on the central role of the judge in the legal system. Although this approach may be applauded for having contributed to a more dynamic attitude towards the law, the role of the legislator remains largely underexposed. Traditional legal theory takes the law as a given, and limits its theoretical undertakings to law as it is. Law, so it is said, is the result of political decision-making. Legislation as a matter of politics is not rational. Politics is believed to be a power game, resulting in compromises that are framed into a legislative or statutory structure. This power game seems to have its own logic, the results of which outweigh, most of the time, any other form of logic. Legal theory for its part is considered, from the perspective of politics at least, to be a theoretical approach to legal problems. It contributes to the description and systematization of existing valid law. It shows up, like Minerva's owl, after the sunset of legislative activity. From that perspective, there is not much hope that legal theory can usefully intervene in the process of legislation or regulation, that is, before or during the creation of rules. Criticism of this view is triggered by the exponential growth of today's legal systems. Complaints about both the increasing volume of legislation and its decreasing quality in most European countries have raised the question as to whether collaboration between legislators and legal theory can help to articulate and solve that problem. This new journal therefore considers legislation from a different angle. The premises of the new approach are that, although legislation and regulation are the results of a political process, they can be the object of theoretical study. Legisprudence focuses on the creation of law, a subject that has been largely underexposed until now. Its object of study is the rational creation of legislation and regulation. As to its method, it makes use of the theoretical insights and tools of current legal theory. Whereas the latter has been dealing most of the time with problems of the application of law by the judge, legisprudence explores the possibilities of the enlargement of the field of study to include the creation of law by the legislator. Existing journals for legislation (eg, Zeitschrift ffir Gesetzgebung (Germany), Statute Law Review (UK) Leges (Switzerland), Regelmaat (the Netherlands), Legislafao (Portugal), Iter Iuris (Italy), Tijdschrift voor Wetgeving

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