Cited by 10Legal Studies and PoliciesComparative and International Law StudiesComparative constitutional jurisprudence studies

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 10 of the 10 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 40 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Legal Doctrinal Scholarship and Interdisciplinary Engagement

Open access
Bodig, Matyas·2015·Erasmus Law Review

Abstract

Legal Doctrinal Scholarship and Interdisciplinary Engagement The paper offers a legal theoretical analysis of the disciplinary character of the contemporary practice of legal scholarship. It is assumed that the challenges of interdisciplinary engagement are particularly revealing about the nature of legal scholarship. The paper argues for an understanding of legal scholarship that revolves around cultivating doctrinal knowledge about law. Legal scholarship is characterised as a normative and interpretive discipline that offers an internalist and non-instrumentalist perspective on law. The paper also argues that interdisciplinary engagement is sometimes necessary for legal scholars because some concepts and ideas built into the doctrinal structures of law cannot be made fully intelligible by way of pure normative legal analysis. This point is developed with the help of an epistemological clarification of doctrinal knowledge and anchored in an account of the practice of legal scholarship. The paper explores the implications of this account by way of analysing three paradigms of interdisciplinary engagement that respond to distinctive challenges facing legal scholarship: (1) understanding better the extra-legal origins of legal ideas, (2) managing discursive encounters that can generate frictions between disciplinary perspectives, and (3) building the knowledge base to handle challenge of validating policy initiatives that aim at changing the law. In different ways, all three challenges may require legal scholars to build competence in other disciplines. The third paradigm has particular relevance for understanding the methodological profile of legal scholarship. Legal scholarship is the only discipline with specific focus on how the social environment affects the doctrinal structures of law.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.5553/elr.000035

Cites

10 of 10 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

146 Own interpretation · 31 Sources not found · 2 No basis given

  • Probably not a substantial claim. 106
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 29
120 of 120
  • The authors state this as an assumption.

    The challenges of interdisciplinary engagement are especially revealing about the nature of legal scholarship.

    “It is assumed that the challenges of interdisciplinary engagement are particularly revealing about the nature of legal scholarship.”
  • The authors state this as an assumption.

    There is significant methodological uncertainty about the character of legal doctrinal scholarship.

    “It is fair to assume that there is significant methodological uncertainty around the very character of legal doctrinal scholarship.”
  • The authors state this as an assumption.

    Law is a normative and institutional social practice that seeks to guide behaviour.

    “First, the law is a normative and institutional social practice that seeks to guide behav-”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Law is a normative social practice.

    “doctrinal knowledge grows in and around normative social practices (like the different incarnations of law or religious practices)”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    There is a constant flow of extra-legal information into legal procedures and practice-related policy debates that pervasively affects how law's normative materials turn out.

    “There is a constant flow of extra-legal information into legal procedures and practice-related policy debates that has a pervasive impact on how the normative materials of law turn out.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Legal scholarship has two analytically distinguishable aspects: dealing with existing legal materials and engaging with challenges of institutional design.

    “Above, I distinguished between two aspects of the practice of legal scholarship: dealing with the existing legal materials and engagement with challenges of institutional design.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Legal scholarship has a non-instrumental perspective on law.

    “The non-instrumental perspective of legal scholarship would be an insurmountable obstacle to that.”
    “Legal scholarship (due to its noninstrumentalist take on law) stands alone among the disciplines with its obvious focus on the latter point.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Legal scholars' professional credibility depends on academic validation.

    “We are talking about judgements of feasibility that put the professional credibility of legal scholars on the line.”
    “As an academic discipline, legal scholarship needs academic validation for the substantive ideas that it chooses to embed in the doctrinal structure of the existing law.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Other disciplines can provide academic validation for policy claims.

    “Only other disciplines can vouch for the claim that, say, 'indirect discrimination' is a genuine problem that calls for new regulation,foot_2 that a crisis of democracy makes the overhaul of the constitutional mechanisms of popular representation necessary, or that we need more imaginative normative tools to address the human rights aspects of environmental harm.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    There is a natural division of labour between legal scholarship and other disciplines.

    “we must accept a natural division of labour here.”
10 of 10

Citations

Cites

Show all 10 references

Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. [3]3. E.L. Rubin, 'Law and the Methodolo- gy of Law', Wisconsin Law Review 521, at 521 (1997).
  2. [5]5. J.M. Smits, 'Redefining Normative Sci- ence: Towards an Argumentative Discipline', in F. Coomans, F. Grün- feld, & M.T. Kamminga (eds.), Methods of Human Rights Research (2009) 45, at 47.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

See all 10

Metadata

Authors
Bodig, M.
Venue
Erasmus Law Review
Published
2015-12
Volume
8
Issue
2
Pages
43-54
ISSN
2210-2671 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2238001377
Cited by
10
References
10
Citations by year
2024: 1 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 2 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 2
FWCI
18.23
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Erasmus Law Review (publishedVersion)
  • SSRN Electronic Journal (submittedVersion)
  • RePub (Erasmus University Rotterdam) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • Aberdeen University Research Archive (Aberdeen University) (submittedVersion)
  • RePub (Erasmus University Rotterdam) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Law › Legal Studies and Policies
  • Social Sciences › Law › Comparative and International Law Studies
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Comparative constitutional jurisprudence studies
Keywords
interdisciplinary engagement, epistemology of law, internalism, policy verification

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

A language model drew the claims from the paper on 2026-10-01, under version 3 of the claim definition (model deepseek-v4.1-flash, prompt extract-v3).

A second model labelled each claim on 2026-10-01 (model jev-1.13-20260917, definition revision gold-guideline-v0.2).

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review