Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.3935/zpfz.72.6.02
Understanding of Legal Science in Contemporary Course Textbooks on Positive Law Subjects at the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb
Luka Burazin
; Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Svan Relac
; Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The paper discusses the explicitly stated understanding of legal science as it appears in compulsory course textbooks on positive law subjects at the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb. The first part of the paper describes the research problem and posits the corresponding hypotheses, states the research aims, describes the method of qualitative content analysis, and elaborates on the content units used (themes, categories and subcategories). The second part establishes the textbooks which contain an explicit determination of a branch of legal science that they belong to, or legal science in general, and the extent to which they contain it. Furthermore, it establishes how the subject matter, objectives and methods of legal science are defined in the textbooks and whether the textbooks include interdisciplinarity as a part of legal research. The third part determines the predominant understanding of the subject matter, objectives and methods of legal science and the predominant understanding of interdisciplinarity of legal research in the analyzed course textbooks. The conclusion contains a discussion of research results, determines the extent to which the hypotheses are confirmed and highlights the possible avenues of further empirical and theoretical research on (Croatian) legal science.
The research results demonstrate that the analyzed textbooks mostly contain at least an elementary determination of legal science, but differ greatly with respect to the placement, extent, and way of its elaboration. Furthermore, according to the predominant understanding, the subject matter of legal science are general legal norms. Its objectives are to describe the law, systematize it and to recommend more appropriate legislative solutions and ways of interpreting and applying it, while its methods are the dogmatic method, the comparative method, and the sociological method. Objectives and methods are mostly just mentioned, without being described and explained. Finally, less than a half of the textbooks mention that legal research includes some level of interdisciplinarity, while the predominant understanding is that interdisciplinarity consists primarily in using insights from other scientific disciplines.
Keywords
legal science; methodology of legal science; subject matter of legal science; objectives of legal science; methods of legal science; interdisciplinarity of legal research
Hrčak ID:
291995
URI
Publication date:
30.12.2022.
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