FILOZOFIA PRAWA A TEORIA PRAWA: SPÓR NIEROZSTRZYGALNY CZY POZORNY?
LEGAL PHILOSOPHY AND LEGAL THEORY: AN IRRESOLVABLE OR OSTENSIBLE DEBATE

Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with a discussion on the status, subject of inquiries and mutual relations of legal philosophy. The first part presents four main approaches to that problem: – legal philosophy as completely redundant discipline due to the development of comprehensive legal theory (and vice versa: redundancy of legal theory); – legal philosophy as autonomous and value-oriented discipline, concentrated on the search of “natural” (or “just”) law; – legal philosophy as an autonomous discipline, not limited to axiological problems, but developed simultaneously with empirical or analytical legal theory; and – legal philosophy as an “umbrella-type” discipline, covering legal philosophy (in a strict sense), legal theory, jurisprudence and so on. All four approaches still attract numerous supporters, however the main claim of the paper is that the last approach is most convincing. In the second part of the paper different arguments for the wide interpretation of legal philosophy are discussed: – a plurality of concepts and theories within each discipline: legal philosophy and legal theory, making all efforts to build simple and clear classifications useless or not consistent; – the fact of permanent changes (evolution) of our legal reality, as well as of our intellectual interpretation of laws; – regionalism of legal theories and legal philosophies. The conclusion is obvious: either legal philosophy will be open to new phenomena, flexible and ready to accept plurality of methods, or legal practice starts to ignore it as a discipline having no importance to the practice of law in a modern world.

• Details
• Contents