On the dominant legal science in law faculties: the crisis of reform

Abstract

The state of crisis in which legal science finds itself is described as a structural effect rather than the crisis of capitalist society. The need for legitimation and reproduction of the capitalist system requires a model of neutral and descriptive science, despite the discrediting of scientism and positivist methodologies. In the case of legal science, the science of law remains trapped in a formalist paradigm that advocates a simple description of the content of the laws and yet that is a way of doing politics, it helps to legitimize and not reveal the political dimensions of traffic and legal relations. The findings of the philosophy of general science and the changes that the welfare state has meant for law oblige us to take seriously that law is a social phenomenon and a historical product whose reason for being goes beyond the simple fact of its existence imposed by the force of the State. Moreover it argues for the revision of the separation of the philosophy of law and the science of law and for a model of explanatory and critical science of law, to realize its meaning and its transformations and assume an immanent critical function of law, objective and dialectic —because it appeals to the social totality as a mediating element of legal —scientific analyses, legal because laws are its object —political because it affects power relations.