Educative Friendship - A Personal Note

In 1992, when I started my doctorate research in the interdisciplinary field of Law and Literature, The Legal Imagination was one of the first books I read. To European eyes, it was a most unusual book since in continental legal theory in those days, the Anglo-analytical tradition was predominant, and French deconstruction had for some time been the up-and coming stream. Fascinated as I became with Professor White\u27s works, I decided to try to get in contact with him in order to ask him about the genesis of his ideas. So much for the dangers of the intentional fallacy Whimsatt and Beardsley warned us against! My supervisor agreed wholeheartedly when I told him about my project, though, with hindsight, probably because he thought the whole enterprise preposterous. After all, from our European perspective then, it would be outrageous to suppose that any famous American professor, and one of the founders of an expanding movement at that, would ever grace such a request with an answer. Nevertheless, write I did, and to my surprise I received a reply, saying, in a letter of September 8, 1992, It is a great honor to me that you have such an interest in my work. I was elated

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

Why law needs the humanities: Judging from experience

This paper reproduces the “Introduction” of the book Judging from Experience: Law, Praxis, Humanities. The aim is to publicize to academic readers the content and the main ideas of this instigating work

Sua cuique persona? A Note on the Fiction of Legal Personhood and a Reflection on Interdisciplinary Consequences

Abstract, The image of the mask is a well-known metaphor in law. It exemplifies the legal persona in that it both hides the private sphere and at the same time it enables participation in the public sphere by means of the legal personality of the rights-and-duties-bearing person that can effectuate legal standing. But legal personhood is itself a fiction, because it is a construction of law without which human beings would “merely” be individual persons.This fiction is most explicit in the artificial personality of corporations. Historically, the attribution of personhood by law shows that issues surrounding personhood, identity and, or in relation to, the body often lead to normative and philosophical contestations. These are important to note in view of disciplinary co-operations of the “Law and” kind on the view that conceptual differences in co-operating fields lead to new Babels rather than interdisciplinary successes