Introduction: The Foundations of a European Legal Method

The methods of legal scholarship today are not self-evident. There are various reasons for the growing self-consciousness of legal scholars about their methodology. One of these is the internationalisation of legal research, which among other things has generated a change in the culture of legal publication towards peer-reviewed journals with stricter norms for methodological justification. Another reason is the weakening link between academic legal scholarship and national legal practice, which raises questions about the identity of legal scholarship as something distinct from legal practice and the extent to which methods define legal scholarship. A third reason is the popularity of interdisciplinary research in law, which gives lawyers reason to compare their own methods to those of other disciplines.