Law and Ethics. The Twin Disciplines

There are three reasons that ethics is a highly productive discipline for legal research. First, its subject, morality, and the academic discipline itself share important characteristics with law and legal research, respectively. Both disciplines are hermeneutic, normative, argumentative, and interdisciplinary. Second, there is an overlap in content, and the disciplines have many central concepts in common, such as democracy, human lights, and justice. Third, as law is a normatively open practice, references to moral ideas and hence to exercises in ethics are often unavoidable. If lawyers or legal researchers want to explore the limits of the legal right to privacy or what a 'reasonable man' should do, they need to have recourse to ethics, Therefore, we may regard legal research and ethics as twin disciplines: closely related and in many respects similar.

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