Tobia on Methodology and Innovation in Jurisprudence @kevin_tobia @kevintobia.bsky.social @GeorgetownLaw

Kevin Tobia, Georgetown University Law Center; Georgetown University Department of Philosophy, has published Methodology and Innovation in Jurisprudence at 123 Columbia Law Review 2483-2516 (2023). Here is the abstract.

Jurisprudence aims to identify and explain important features of law. To accomplish this task, what method should one employ? Elucidating Law, a tour de force in “the philosophy of legal philosophy,” develops an instructive account of how philosophers “elucidate law,” which in turn elucidates jurisprudence’s own aims and methods. This Review introduces the book, with emphasis on its discussion of methodology. Next, the Review proposes complementing methodological clarification with methodological innovation. Jurisprudence should ask some timeless questions, but its methods need not stagnate. Consider that jurisprudence has a long tradition of asserting claims about how “we” understand the law—in which “we” might refer to all people, citizens of a jurisdiction, ordinary people, legal experts, or legal officials. There are now rich empirical literatures that bear on these claims, and methods from “experimental jurisprudence” and related disciplines can assess untested assertions. Today’s jurisprudence can achieve greater rigor by complementing traditional methods with empirical ones.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

(Reviewing Dickson, Elucidating Law, OUP, 2022).