Proučavanje prava – pravna nauka, teorija i filozofija
Study of the law – legal science, legal theory and philosophy of law

Summary/Abstract: In the paper the author analyzes a topic that is relatively neglected in domestic legal theory, namely which are the ways of study of the law. In our legal culture, it is customary for disciplines dealing with the study of the law to be divided into legal science (legal doctrine, doctrinal study of law), empirical legal disciplines, legal theory and legal philosophy, and this division is taken as an initial framework of the analysis. The article examines the basic characteristics of each of these approaches to study of the law, with a previous explanation of the wider disciplinary and epistemological framework within which they can be classified. After analyzing each individual approach to law research, it comes to the conclusion that dealing with the first and second kind of research (doctrinal and empirical) is necessarily related to the third (theoretical) and that the third relies on the fourth (philosophical). In other words, every successful and fruitful legal scholar (doctrinal or empiricist) at the same time is a legal theorist and sometimes a legal philosopher. And vice versa. This, however, does not mean that the existing disciplinary division of study of the law is not justified, nor should it be neglected (especially for didactic reasons), but only that it is a question of the focus of the legal researcher on a particular problem that he solves, and not the question of an intransigent and insurmountable disciplinary barriers.

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