The Great Divide: Facts versus Values

Following the example set by American scholarship, legal scholarship in Europe has produced more and more multidimensional academic work relating to a wide array of topics that traditionally belong to the field of law over the last few decades. In these empirically-orientated legal studies, ‘extralegal knowledge’, i.e. empirical insights stemming from disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and economics, are combined with existing legal insights based on traditional legal argumentation techniques, and then transformed into ‘novel’ legal knowledge to further different sorts of public policy aims. One of many intriguing, and as yet unresolved questions underlying these kinds of studies in Empirical Legal Scholarship is whether it is in fact possible – and if so, how, why and when – to leap from such extralegal empirical insights to normative legal conclusions.