Introduction: Multi- and Interdisciplinarity: mere theory or just practice?

‘As lawyers we cannot simply accept the conclusions of others; we must make them our own, and to do this we need to step out of the legal culture and into that of the other one. In doing this we are not picking up “findings” but ‘learning a language’, wrote James Boyd White in 1990 in his book Justice as Translation. This third issue of Erasmus Law Review addresses multi- and interdisciplinarity in law from the perspective of legal methodology. Was Richard Posner right when as early as 1987 he foresaw the decline of law as an autonomous discipline? The explosion of ‘Law and…’ movements seems to suggest that he was. Nevertheless, methodological and epistemological questions of intellectual integration within interdisciplinary movements all too often remain underexposed. What then is the similarity – and that at a fundamental level – between the two disciplines connected by the word ‘and’? And is the perceived connection between two disciplines in itself also an idea that should be elaborated? Or is interdisciplinarity only the importation of a technique or methodology from one field to another, for the sole purpose of solving a specific problem, the solution of which cannot be found in the original field itself?