Panu Minkkinen

Law as a Human Science argues for the reintroduction of crucial aspects of the humanist tradition in legal thinking. Interdisciplinary studies of law are now primarily understood as policy-oriented and socio-legal in their orientation; whilst the older ties between law and the humanities (with philosophy, history, rhetoric, etc.) have become more marginal academic curiosities. This book makes a renewed case for law as a human science, by investigating the development of modern law as an academic discipline in relation to both the social scientific and hermeneutical traditions. The former – more Anglophone – approach associates law with an instrumental notion of knowledge and science: legal knowledge can be exploited both as a practitioner's tool and to provide potentially workable solutions to social problems. In contrast, the hermeneutic – and more Continental – approach situates law among the human sciences. This makes the instrumentalisation of legal knowledge difficult, if not impossible. But it is this approach that Panu Minkkinen defends here, in a radicalisation of law’s traditional affiliations with the human sciences. The ‘hermeneutical legal academic’, he argues, provides not only a renewed basis for seeing law as a human science, but also a new foundation for understanding it as an essentially critical enterprise.

Sovereignty, Knowledge, Law investigates the notion of sovereignty from three different, but related perspectives: as a legal question in relation to the sovereign state, as a political question in relation to sovereign power, and as a metaphysical question in relation to sovereign self-knowledge. The varied and interchangeable uses of legal sovereignty, political sovereignty and metaphysical sovereignty in contemporary debates have resulted in a situation where the word ‘sovereignty’ itself has become something of a non-concept. Panu Minkkinen shows here how these three perspectives have informed one another, by addressing their shared relationship to law, and to the ‘autocephalous’ function of sovereignty; that is, the attempt to provide a single source and foundation for law, power, and self-knowledge. Through an effort to domesticate the intrinsically ‘heterocephalous’ nature of power, the juridical and jurisprudential aim has been to confine power within the closed vertical hierarchy of traditional legal thinking. Sovereignty, Knowledge, Law thus elaborates this heterocephaly, proposing new understandings of sovereignty, as well as of law and of legal scholarship.

Sovereignty, Knowledge, Law investigates the notion of sovereignty from three different, but related perspectives: as a legal question in relation to the sovereign state, as a political question in relation to sovereign power, and as a metaphysical question in relation to sovereign self-knowledge. The varied and interchangeable uses of legal sovereignty, political sovereignty and metaphysical sovereignty in contemporary debates have resulted in a situation where the word ‘sovereignty’ itself has become something of a non-concept. Panu Minkkinen shows here how these three perspectives have informed one another, by addressing their shared relationship to law, and to the ‘autocephalous’ function of sovereignty; that is, the attempt to provide a single source and foundation for law, power, and self-knowledge. Through an effort to domesticate the intrinsically ‘heterocephalous’ nature of power, the juridical and jurisprudential aim has been to confine power within the closed vertical hierarchy of traditional legal thinking. Sovereignty, Knowledge, Law thus elaborates this heterocephaly, proposing new understandings of sovereignty, as well as of law and of legal scholarship.

The book is an attempt to evaluate the reception of Continental philosophy (phenomenology,hermeneutics, deconstruction, etc.) within mainstream jurisprudence. The book claims that the reduction of philosophy to social theory can only be accomplished by impoverishing the impetus of philosophical thinking and, consequently, by transforming critique into criticism, and the philosophy of law into legal theory. The response developed in this book is the creation of a metaphysical understanding of law or, in other words, what Aristotle called a 'first philosophy'. In addition to philosophy proper - the classics of Antiquity, the great German philosophers, contemporary French thinking -, the book covers a wide range of jurisprudential literature. These include the neo-Kantian philosophers of law whose thinking is allegedly at the root of legal positivism, but special emphasis is also given to 'existential' philosophers of law deeply inspired by the hermeneutical phenomenology of Martin Heidegger. Lastly, the book encourages specifically philosophical approaches in law to the thinking of French contemporaries whose work has inspired critical legal scholarship during the past ten years.