Knowledge, Legal

Intellectual Context

The focus on legal knowledge represents a departure from some traditional law and society approaches that treat legal theory, legal doctrine, legal concepts, and the thoughts of legal experts as a black box, or as phenomena to be explained or even debunked through sociological analysis of the institutional and political context of these ideas. Traditionally, law and society scholarship has focused more on the people and groups that affect and are affected by the law, and on law as a set of institutions and processes, not on law as a set of knowledge practices.

At the same time, the study of legal knowledge is clearly distinct from doctrinal legal analysis because it aims not to interpret the law, solve legal problems, or make normative claims about the direction of legal development. Legal knowledge studies aim to understand the broader character of legal thinking as a whole, independent of any particular doctrinal elements; its relationship to other kinds of knowledge, such as scientific or religious knowledge; and its [Page 886]cultural, social, or political effects. This approach differs also from critical legal studies and from many cultural studies of law insofar as its aim is not so much to expose the contradictions, inconsistencies, or instabilities of legal thought as to understand legal knowledge on its own terms, including its significance and appeal from various legal actors' own point of view.

The study of legal knowledge builds upon several existing theoretical traditions and disciplinary perspectives. The character of legal and bureaucratic reasoning figures prominently in social theory, from the works of Max Weber (1864–1920) to those of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), John Dewey (1859–1952), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), and Michel Foucault (1926–1984), among many others, and different approaches to the study of legal knowledge draw on the disparate theoretical traditions of these writers. The study of legal knowledge also draws its inspiration from the study of forms of knowledge in cognate disciplines. New work in science and technology studies on the social construction of scientific truths among experts, such as laboratory technicians, mathematicians, or engineers, in particular, have inspired work on the social construction of legal truths. Likewise, work in the anthropology of knowledge and cultural geography on the way certain forms of knowledge constitute certain kinds of subjectivity have contributed to legal thought; and how forms of knowledge take on, or are perceived to take on, transnational valence has been an important influence. Work in the sociology of knowledge, from Pierre Bourdieu's (1930–2002) practice theory to Niklas Luhmann's (1927–1998) systems theory have also provided important insights. Some scholars working on legal knowledge draw on linguistic and psychoanalytic theory. Finally, feminist theory, with its early and continuous concern with “ways of knowing” and its influence on feminist legal theory, has opened room for thinking about “legal ways of knowing.”

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