ABSTRACT
In the English-speaking world countless textbooks adopt the same basic story about how legal theory became multidisciplinary. They teach that in the 19th and 20th centuries legal positivism had theorized law as an autonomous or ‘anti-multidiscplinary’ social system, yet positivists failed to explain certain important elements or operations of law. The problem with that story is that it too readily becomes the entire history of legal theory, glibly neglecting millennia of legal thinking and dismissing classical theories as if they were not genuine theory at all. If we return to the origins of systematic thinking about law and justice in the West, we see that multidisciplinarity in theorizing law is nothing new, heralding only a return to what thinking about law has always been.
Heinze, Eric, Multidisciplinary Theory in Law (January 17, 2024). For publication in Multidisciplinary Theory, Jeffrey di Leo (ed), New York: Bloomsbury, 2025; Queen Mary Law Research Paper No 415/2024.
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