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"Preface" [2016] ELECD 1003; in Taekema, Sanne; Klink, van Bart; Been, de Wouter (eds), "Facts and Norms in Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016) xi

Book Title: Facts and Norms in Law

Editor(s): Taekema, Sanne; Klink, van Bart; Been, de Wouter

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781785361081

Section Title: Preface

Number of pages: 2

Extract:

Preface
In 2011, two of us ­ Sanne and Bart ­ published the edited volume Law
and Method: Interdisciplinary Research into Law, which gave an intro-
duction to various interdisciplinary approaches to law. In our introductory
chapter, we discussed several challenges that legal researchers who
engage in interdisciplinary research face. Some of these may be obvious:
how to read statistics without proper training, for example. Others may
be more hidden: for instance, how to interpret familiar concepts which
have a different meaning in another discipline. One of the more funda-
mental problems we addressed was the fact­value separation. According
to some legal scholars, such as Hans Kelsen, a distinction can be drawn
between empirical sciences that are concerned with facts, on the one
hand, and normative disciplines that deal with values, on the other.
Empirical sciences, among which are the natural sciences, observe how
things are, whereas normative sciences such as ethics and legal scholar-
ship are concerned with how things should be. This strict fact­value
separation is rejected by scholars adhering to other, non-positivist scien-
tific approaches, in particular hermeneutics and pragmatism. According
to the pragmatist philosopher Hilary Putnam, knowledge of facts pre-
sumes knowledge of values and, vice versa, knowledge of values
presupposes knowledge of facts. In his hermeneutical philosophy of law,
Ronald Dworkin also rejects a strict fact­value distinction. According to
him, statements about what the law is, have both a factual and an
evaluative dimension, because they have to fit the existing system of ...