The Study of Law as an Academic Discipline

This paper deals with the study of law as an academic discipline, in two ways. First, the study of law within the university does not speak for itself: in contrast with classical Athens, where law was not at all considered to be a matter for specialists, or Norman England, where specialists with a vocational training came to deal with the ‘common law’, in continental Europe at the end of the 11th century the study of law developed into one of the core academic disciplines at the newly established universities, as a result of the revival of the Byzantine version of Roman law as the ius commune. Second, as an academic study, contrary to what is sometimes suggested, the methods available to its students are diverse. This paper shows that law can be studied with the help of methods comparable to the ones used in other academic disciplines, notably the natural sciences and the humanities.