Scientia Iuris

Law’s regulatory reach has grown significantly over the past few decades. Yet, at the same time, law schools and legal professions in Western and Western-oriented jurisdictions have undergone an acute crisis. How is this possible? In this insightful and wide-ranging book, Luca Siliquini-Cinelli argues that these trends are in fact complementary manifestations of a single phenomenon—namely, that law is and will always be more capable of regulating social interaction without the experiential contribution of legal experts. Siliquini-Cinelli contends that the separation of law’s regulatory function from legal experts is structurally linked to the former’s nature and operational dynamics as an intellectual artifact to be used for ordering purposes. As a product of the intellect, law is a matter of knowledge, not experience. In fact, Siliquini-Cinelli holds, law’s artifactuality voids experience, including that of legal experts, making it redundant. This explains how law can thrive as a regulatory phenomenon while the very places where future legal professionals are formed and those places where it is practised are in crisis. To show this, Siliquini-Cinelli embarks upon a historical, philosophical, and comparative analysis of law’s artifactuality, focusing on the teaching, study and practise of law as intellectual endeavours, from the advent of juristic activities in the Late Roman Republic to current legal pedagogies, practices, and reforms in Civil and Common law jurisdictions. In so doing, Siliquini-Cinelli employs the Latin phrase ‘scientia iuris’ to explain why and how legal education and practice pursue knowledge at the expense of experience, and the serious implications this has for lawyering activities. Moving beyond established narratives, Siliquini-Cinelli argues that ‘scientia iuris’ ought not be reduced to dogmatic analysis (scientia iuris as doctrina iuris). Rather, ‘scientia iuris’ denotes the knowledge of the law sought by all those who teach, study, and practise it, and which is actualised through a form of legal thinking and argumentation that moves along reason’s metaphysical, constructivist lines (scientia iuris as cognitio iuris). Thus, scientia iuris is not the prerogative of a few legal scholars; rather, it lies at the very core of Western legal education and practice, broadly understood. The relevance of Siliquini-Cinelli’s original and interdisciplinary analysis is profound and far-reaching: the crisis that legal education and practice are undergoing is not an isolated, or accidental, event; it is a consequence of the very ways in which law has been taught, studied, and practised since Rome. Endorsements ‘This richly researched book on the history of scientia iuris is a work on epistemology which argues that the legal model is highly problematic and will eventually be able to function without the intervention of jurists and lawyers. Such a thesis is based upon a very detailed knowledge both of philosophy and of the legal primary and secondary sources from Roman to modern times. The author is at home with Ancient Greek, Latin, French, German and Italian texts and this means that the research basis for the thesis not only is unusually profound – encompassing both the civil and the common law – but will make a major contribution to historical jurisprudence, to comparative legal history, to comparative law in general and to legal theory. This is legal scholarship of the highest order.’ Geoffrey Samuel, Emeritus Professor of Law, Kent Law School ‘In this exceptionally robust and expertly-researched new book, Luca Siliquini-Cinelli presents a provocative thesis. He proposes that the experience of legal experts is redundant when it comes to the success of law as a regulatory framework. Oscillating between historical, material, philosophical and literary frames, Siliquini-Cinelli introduces what he terms ‘law’s artifactuality’. Law’s artifactuality as an intellectual phenomenon of social ordering is established through a comparative excavation of legal pedagogy and practice stretching from the Late Roman Republic to contemporary contexts to expose law as a product of the intellect. Law is therefore a matter of knowledge, not experience. Siliquini-Cinelli makes a sophisticated philosophical case for scientia iuris as a special form of knowledge that exists distinct from experience. This is at the core of the book in claiming that the current detachment of law from legal experts is a symptom of law’s essential and enduring artifactuality. This detachment is therefore incubated and internal to law’s essential nature rather than a consequence of the prophetic shadow of AI. This book is a vital and timely intervention in the current crisis gripping legal education and legal practice and their future relation with AI. The book is a stellar example of the profound importance of historical and philosophical thinking in law as a means to understanding contemporary phenomena in law. Siliquini-Cinelli executes his analysis masterfully and brings fundamental insights to the debate on knowledge and experience in law.’ Kimberley Brayson, Professor of Critical Jurisprudence, Leicester Law School ‘This book is not for the faint-hearted or the narrow-minded. It is not for the narrow-minded as it paints on the broadest of canvasses, from the Late Roman Republic to the Middle Ages to the Methodological Legal Positivism that characterises modernity. It is not for the faint-hearted as it makes the bold claim that law does not need lawyers. The reason law does not need lawyers is that law is based on knowledge, not experience. If Luca Siliquini-Cinelli is right, then Oliver Wendell Holmes is wrong. The stakes could not be higher.’ Joshua Neoh, Associate Professor of Law, ANU College of Law

This book seeks to question the widely held assumption in Europe that to have knowledge of law is simply to have knowledge of rules. There is a knowledge dimension beyond the symbolic which reaches right into the way facts are perceived, constructed and deconstructed. In support of this thesis the book examines, generally, the question of what it is to have knowledge of law; and this examination embraces not just the conceptual foundations, methods, taxonomy and theories used by jurists. It also examines the epistemological schemes used by social scientists in general in order to show that such schemes are closely related to the schemes of intelligibility used by lawyers and judges.

TO VOLUMES 9 AND 10 OF THE TREATISE I am happy to present here the third batch of volumes for the Treatise project: This is the batch consisting of Volumes 9 and 10, namely, A History of the P- losophy of Law in the Civil Law World, 1600–1900, edited by Damiano Canale, Paolo Grossi, and Hasso Hofmann, and The Philosophers’ Philosophy of Law from the Seventeenth Century to Our Days, by Patrick Riley. Three v- umes will follow: Two are devoted to the philosophy of law in the 20th c- tury, and the third one will be the index for the entire Treatise, which will 1 therefore ultimately comprise thirteen volumes. This Volume 9 runs parallel to Volume 8, A History of the Philosophy of Law in the Common Law World, 1600–1900, by Michael Lobban, published in 2007. Volume 10, for its part, takes up where Volume 6 left off: which appeared under the title A History of the Philosophy of Law from the Ancient Greeks to the Scholastics (edited by Fred Miller Jr. in association with Carrie-Ann Biondi, likewise published in 2007), and which is mainly a history of the p- losophers’ philosophy of law (let us refer to this philosophy as A).

This book represents a first attempt to investigate the relations between Law and Agroecology. There is a need to adopt a transdisciplinary approach to multifunctional agriculture in order to integrate the agroecological paradigm in legal regulation. This does not require a super-law that hierarchically purports to incorporate and supplant the existing legal fields; rather, it calls for the creation of a trans-law that progressively works to coordinate interlegalities between different legal fields, respecting their autonomy but emphasizing their common historical roots in rus in the process. Rus, the rural phenomenon as a whole, reflects the plurality and interdependence of different complex systems based jointly on the land as a central point of reference. “Rural” is more than “agricultural”: if agriculture is understood traditionally as an activity aimed at exploiting the land for the production of material goods for use, consumption and private exchange, rurality marks the reintegration of agriculture into a broader sphere, one that is not only economic, but also social and cultural; not only material, but also ideal, relational, historical, and symbolic; and not only private, but also public. In approaching rus, the natural and social sciences first became specialized, multiplied, and compartmentalized in a plurality of first-order disciplines; later, they began a process of integration into Agroecology as a second-order, multi-perspective and shared research platform. Today, Agroecology is a transdiscipline that integrates other fields of knowledge into the concept of agroecosystems viewed as socio-ecological systems. However, the law seems to still be stuck in the first stage. Following a reductionist approach, law has deconstructed and shattered the universe of rus into countless, disjointed legal elementary particles, multiplying the planes of analysis and, in particular, keeping Agricultural Law and Environmental Law two separate fields.

Moving from the scientific revolution to the nineteenth-century rise of legal codes, Berkowitz tells the story of how lawyers and philosophers invented legal science to preserve law's claim to moral authority. The "gift" of science, however, proved bittersweet. Instead of strengthening the bond between law and justice, the subordination of law to science transformed law from an ethical order into a tool for social and economic ends.

This book explores the reactions to Europeanization and globalization in times of economic distress, including the transformation of European values in national legal cultures. The authors explore how European values, tradition and new legal challenges interconnect and dictate the paths of transition between old and new Europe. The first chapter starts with a question: can Roman Legal Tradition play a role of identity factor towards a New Europe? Can it be considered as a general value identifying new Europe, built on a minimum core of principles – persona, dominum, obligation, contract and inheritance – composing the whole European private law tradition? Subsequent chapters attempt to provide possible responses to the question: what is Europe today? The answers diverge, depending on the research area. The inherent dichotomy of human rights protection in Europe and the concept of ‘one law, one court’ are investigated in the second chapter, whereas the third chapter focuses on asylum and the interrelation and interdependence of the Court of Justice of the EU and the European Court of Human Rights. The next three chapters concentrate on matters of equal treatment and non-discrimination. The first contribution in this part reflects on the crisis and methodological and conceptual issues faced by modern anti-discrimination law. It is followed by a specific analysis of the empowerment of women or gender-balancing in company boards. The third contribution reveals the impact of the Croatian anti-discrimination law on private law relations. The next chapter deals with the issue of social rights in Croatia and the method of their regulation in the context of the new European values. The immense challenges posed by the market integration imperative and democratic transition have brought about different reactions in the national legal systems and legal cultures of both old and new Member States. As such, Europe has effectively been reunited, but what about the convergence of national legal cultures? This is the focal point of the remaining chapters, which focus on various issues, from internal market, competition law, consumer welfare, liberalization of network industries to the EU capital market. The magnitude of EU activity in these areas offers conclusive evidence that old and new paradigms are evolving and shaping the future of the EU.