How does jurisprudence relate to other disciplines? Alexander Stark's deliberative concept examines the eligibility of knowledge and insights from neighbouring fields for legal argumentation - and reveals where the lines of interdisciplinary legal dogmatics are to be drawn.
Legal dogmatics appears to be somewhat immune to moral facts as well as scientific
knowledge. Non-legal reasons are, according to a widely held view, not
or at least generally not relevant for doctrinal studies. Against this backdrop, I
try to shed some light on questions such as: How does jurisprudence relate to
other disciplines? What role do non-legal bodies of knowledge play in doctrinal
deliberation? What is the relationship between legal and non-legal reasons?
I argue for an account of legal dogmatics that makes apparent the potentially
rich relationship between legal dogmatics and other disciplines. The incompatibility
thesis, according to which knowledge of other disciplines cannot be
integrated into doctrinal studies (§ 11), is not justified, or so I argue.
The main idea is to understand legal dogmatics as deliberation about what
legal agents are rationally required to do. Legal agents act rationally, if, and
only if, they correctly respond to the (decisive) normative reasons. The set of
normative reasons, legal agents ought to respond to, consists of both legal and
non-legal (normative) reasons. If and insofar as legal reasons run out, legal
agents ought to respond to the given non-legal normative reasons.
What does this mean for the capacity of legal dogmatics for interdisciplinarity?
I differentiate between descriptive and normative legal dogmatics. Descriptive
legal dogmatics identifies the content and structures of legal systems,
i.e., within an action-based approach, the legal reasons. Within a descriptive
approach, interdisciplinarity is limited for the legal facts that generate the legal
reasons are its sole research object. Nevertheless, in many situations non-legal
knowledge and reasons are required to identify the legal reasons, especially
when the legal facts themselves entail references to external facts (see § 10 I.).
Normative legal dogmatics is directed at - hypothetical, potential or actual -
legal actions; its goal is to identify the given legal and non-legal reasons agents
ought to respond to in particular contexts. Insofar as legal reasons do not comprehensively
determine legal actions, (the observed or imagined) legal agents
are not legally obliged. From a legal perspective, they are free to choose any of
the remaining actions. Though legal reasons do not further guide what legal
agents ought to do in these situations, non-legal normative reasons - e.g. epistemic
or moral reasons - usually do. The main task of interdisciplinary legal
dogmatics is to identify these reasons (§ 10 II.).
