On the feasibility of interdisciplinary in legal research

On the feasibility of interdisciplinary in legal research

From the point of view of theory and practice, the general trend of future discipline research is bound to be that the barriers between disciplines are gradually broken down and they interact with each other frequently, so as to expand the research field and enrich the research level. So, is it feasible to cross disciplines in legal research?

Interdisciplinary integration is a very hot topic in academic circles in recent years. This idea of breaking discipline barriers, realizing inter-disciplinary communication and mutual promotion, and realizing innovative leap-forward development is constantly affecting the scientific development of the current society. Different from the chaotic relationship between disciplines before the industrial revolution, the integration of disciplines does not mean that disciplines devour each other and eventually return to an indistinguishable chaotic state, but that disciplines form an independent but interrelated system. There are successful precedents for this trend. We know that molecular biology and quantum mechanics, as well as emerging psychological research and brain science research, are produced by the combination of classical disciplines.

Theoretical basis of interdisciplinary research of law.

Our era is at the forefront of the third scientific and technological revolution, and mankind has benefited from the great achievements brought by the second industrial revolution, such as the improvement of life expectancy, the development of fossil fuels and the convenience of modern society, which have become great challenges for mankind in the future. Science is still progressing, but the speed is obviously flat. The bottleneck of traditional science came as scheduled after 200 years of explosive development. If there is no new breakthrough, we obviously can't solve the fatal problems such as population explosion, fossil resource consumption and food shortage in this bottleneck period. It can be said that the development of human social technology has contributed to the cross-integration of disciplines.

In today's society, we must have a clear understanding of law as an independent discipline, whether it can cross-integrate with other disciplines, in what way it will cross-integrate with other disciplines, and to what extent this cross-integration can be achieved.

1. Relative independence of law

As an ancient discipline, law can be traced back to the ancient Roman Republic before the 3rd century. Its research content is closely related to national governance and political consolidation, and it was once regarded as a political tool or extension. At the same time, morality, as a behavior constraint caused by people's internal self-discipline, is often misunderstood because its behavior pattern is similar to that of law. Although politics and law, law and morality are naturally closely related, the obvious and subtle differences between them make us clearly realize that it is obviously inappropriate to confuse politics with law and morality with law indiscriminately. So we can draw a conclusion that law is an independent science, not attached to other disciplines.

In what form does the law exist? The history of the struggle between eternal law and secular law is almost as long as that of western civilization. On the other hand, the debate about what kind of law can be called law is also prolonged, the most famous of which is the debate between analytical school and natural law school about whether evil law is law. Although this debate has lasted for nearly two centuries, nowadays people are more inclined to accept the view that law should have value judgment and think that law is not an isolated clause divorced from human value orientation. If a law loses its function of maintaining fairness and justice, or even becomes a tool of injustice and oppression, then it should lose its status and need a new law to replace it. We can be sure that there has never been an isolated and eternal law in the world. As a product of the development of human society, law is bound to be closely related to all aspects of society, and will be revised continuously with the progress of history. The relatively independent but not closed nature of law is the basis for the cross-integration of law as a discipline with other disciplines.

Just as the development of science and technology promotes the cross-integration of disciplines, the cross-integration of law and other disciplines will also bring new breakthroughs to the practice of law itself.

2. Legal practice is closely related to science and technology.

With the development of science and technology, many evidences that are crucial to a case have multi-level manifestations, which may be difficult for ordinary people to understand intuitively. Therefore, both the prosecution and the defense often invite professional and technical personnel involved in relevant aspects to explain the evidence in the course of litigation. This method is frequently used in court trials in common law system. Through the video materials, we can clearly see a trial. The number of professionals invited to the court is not only huge, but also involves almost all disciplines in the world today. Scientists in the traditional sense, such as physicists and chemists, are obviously frequent visitors to court trials, and the testimony of psychologists and psychiatrists is often convincing. Even mysticism such as "divination" and "astrology" is modern. It can be seen that the court, as the arena of evidence, legal rules and academic opinions, obviously not only invited players in the legal field. The practice of British and American courts fully proves the fact that today's courts can also become a platform for the collision of cutting-edge technologies if possible.

On the other hand, the court trial in the civil law system is dominated by judges, which may make the court scene in the civil law system less intense than that in the British and American courts, but this does not mean that the civil law system excludes or refuses to use other disciplines to explain evidence, demonstrate theories and prove legal rules. We should notice that, as expert conclusion or witness testimony, the theories and methods of other disciplines are also influencing the trend of cases in civil law courts, and we can feel that this influence is increasing with the development of society and science. It can be said that the practice of the civil law system and the common law system, which are the dominant legal fields in the world today, has fully proved that science of law and other disciplines can realize the cross-integration of quantum mechanics, biochemistry and other disciplines.

3. The emergence of law is influenced by many factors.

If it is only a superficial combination between law and other disciplines to use the technology of other disciplines to react to the application of legal rules, then from the perspective of legislation, we can still find strong evidence to prove that law has indeed collided with various disciplines in society and will continue to collide. The statistical quantification method of mathematics has always been valued by legislators and widely used. There is no need to repeat it. What we need to know is the great influence of modern science on modern law. As we all know, the scientific achievements in the past 300 years have exceeded the sum of the past 1000 years, and even many achievements are not the perfection and progress of some known sciences, but come from emerging categories that have never appeared in the history of human disciplines in the past. These new social fields generated by emerging science also need new laws to adjust and explain. Even if all the theories are exhausted in this huge project, it is impossible to completely cover it.

For a simple example, genetic engineering, as a brand-new biological science born in the 1970s, turned cloning technology from a scientific fantasy into a reality. Then the appearance of Dolly Sheep made people have to face a question, whether the act of cloning human beings should be recognized by law. Although most countries in the world hold the attitude of prohibiting or avoiding human cloning at present, this does not hinder researchers' interest in human cloning technology research. At present, three foreign organizations have announced that they will carry out human cloning experiments within two years, which has aroused strong concern from the academic community and even the whole society. Religious people naturally hold a strong opposition to this experiment, but some scholars believe that there is no reason to stop the development of science. Literally, whether human cloning is legal is indeed a legal issue. According to the previous legislative ideas and procedures, it is not difficult to draw a yes or no conclusion. However, the ethical crisis caused by the problem of human cloning in real society makes the law have to be carefully considered before promulgation. Similarly, the legal regulation issues in new research fields such as Internet science and cloud storage technology all reflect the dilemma faced by law as an independent discipline in coping with the current social development trend. Simply put, there is no soil suitable for the existence of purely independent disciplines in today's society. After a hundred years of separation and division, disciplines are now facing the future of cross-integration again, and law is no exception.

Second, the interdisciplinary background of the "marginal discipline" of law

The change and prosperity of law can not avoid modern science, nor can it be completely divorced from humanities and social sciences. In fact, the paradise of legal research should not be confined to the castle of jurists. The perspective of legal research is constantly expanding with the overall vision of human beings, and it is precisely because we realize that being limited to a certain fixed thinking framework and mode will make legal research one-sided and rigid that new disciplines such as legal anthropology, ethics, legal sociology and legal economics have emerged in this process.

1. Law and Anthropology

It is generally believed in academic circles that the study of legal anthropology rose from the middle and late19th century to the early 20th century. The research tracks of Montesquieu, savigny, Malinowski, Hooper and others can roughly outline the historical process of the birth of legal anthropology as a science. Anthropological research methods have entered the research hall of law and produced a series of interesting "chemical reactions", which injected new vitality into the ancient law discipline, enriched the connotation of law and expanded the field of law.

2. Law and sociology

Compared with legal anthropology, legal sociology seems to be a broader concept. If we compare the relationship between law and society to a big pocket, almost all social phenomena related to law can be put in it. Law is a kind of human behavior, and this concept has been repeatedly emphasized by legal sociology. At the same time, sociology of law also contains many schools of values, including instrumentalism, anti-formalism and pluralism. The legal view of instrumentalism holds that the purpose of human behavior is also applicable to legal behavior. From the perspective of social function, the role of law in social development can be adjusted because of the characteristics of its tools. Anti-formalism legal view holds that law is not an isolated and purely formalistic rule system, but an activity that people carry out in society, and legal order is a way of organization and decision. Ehrlich's views on "state law" and "living law" embody a pluralistic view of law. Reference law is not limited to the formulation of the state, and the state law is only a part of the whole legal system. As long as it can ensure the implementation of norms for the authorities, it can be called law. Among these three theories, the anti-formalism view of law is more acceptable. Law is the product of human society. Studying law from the perspective and method of sociology can help us have a deeper understanding of its operation mode.

3. Law and Ethics

The emergence of ethics can be regarded as the inevitable result of the development of law and ethics, and the moral category involved in ethics is implicit in legal reality. Law and morality, as two rules that regulate and restrict human behavior in human society, play a role at the same time in the long history of human beings, and there are few incompatible conflicts, which is enough to prove how close they are. At the same time, it is worth noting that law and ethics have been proved to be independent disciplines in the past, and they have completely different ways of action, so the disciplinary barriers between them have not been completely eliminated or even confused because of the emergence of ethics. This shows that the research focus of ethics is not limited to the study of the relationship between law and ethics, but should be the parallel study of law and ethics, that is, the study of law and ethics.

4. Law and Economics

Legal economics is called "economic analysis of law" and "law and economics". The study of law and economics has always had two different directions. One is that law economics studies law with economic methods from the perspective of pure law, and the other is that law economics expands the research object of economics from the perspective of pure economics, and explains the problems in non-market fields such as legal system to the research field of economics. The second direction is the current mainstream view in the world. Law and economics originated in the United States, and holds that all legal activities, including all legislation and judicature and the whole legal system, are ultimately playing the role of allocating scarce resources, that is, pursuing the effective allocation and rational utilization of legal resources and social costs. The method of economics can completely analyze and predict the whole legal activity. Economics is the closest to modern science among all the humanities and even social sciences, and it is also an unprecedented new idea to explain legal issues by means of economics.

Third, the "marginal problems" faced by interdisciplinary research.

Facing the interdisciplinary movement in full swing, we often feel confused. Where is the boundary of cross-domain integration? As an independent science, should law be open to all for interdisciplinary purposes? If interdisciplinary is the future trend, is it necessary to have a "pure" law discipline? In my opinion, to solve the above problems, we must first understand the most basic principle, that is, where is the purpose of interdisciplinary integration. As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, the ultimate goal of interdisciplinary integration is not to erase the particularity and independence between disciplines, but to form a network of disciplines that exchange needed items with each other to meet the upcoming third technological revolution and finally realize the all-round leap in politics, economy and culture of human society. According to this idea, we can easily answer the above questions. As an independent science, law should maintain its independent status like other disciplines. The interdisciplinary process is also a process of expanding the research field and excavating the research depth. We should have a clear understanding of the interdisciplinary research model. To stop blindly following the trend or competing with each other, we should grasp the degree of interdisciplinary step by step, and at the same time, we need to admit that the margin between interdisciplinary subjects is also independent.

Four. conclusion

As mentioned in the article, although interdisciplinary as a new discipline development model is still in its infancy, from the perspective of theory and practice, the general trend of future discipline research is bound to gradually break down the barriers between disciplines and interact frequently with each other in order to expand the research field and enrich the research level. The development history of law is accompanied by the development of human society, and the interdisciplinary trend of law is inevitable. In the process of cross-integration of law and other disciplines, the connotation and significance of legal research will be enriched.

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