A Call for Developing a Field of Positive Legal Methodology

This issue of The University of Chicago Law Review brings together leading scholars to discuss developing best practices for legal analysis. The goal of its organizers, however, is somewhat less modest: to encourage a movement that develops a positive legal methodology. Years of reading legal scholarship have convinced us that scholars ought to devote more attention to positive methodology— figuring out how to tell what the law is—something that may seem like second nature to most lawyers, but that often relies on intuition and armchair persuasion. To be sure, legal scholars have over time imported theory and methods from other fields—including economics, history, political science, psychology, sociology, biology, and anthropology—to make normative claims more rigorous.

But most of that arbitrage is used to support or test policy implications of a law, not to determine what the law is. And in any event, we think law can and should contribute its own distinctive methodology, rather than being colonized by other disciplines. The movement we desire would meet this need by developing methods to determine what the law is and how best to apply (perhaps normatively motivated) methods of legal interpretation or analysis.