Ways of Naturalizing Jurisprudence

Abstract

‘Naturalism in jurisprudence’, for anyone acquainted with the doctrine, would typically remind her of Brian Leiter’s naturalized jurisprudence?the very naturalized jurisprudence he characteristically has proposed and defended since 1990s. On this viewpoint, he claimed that law and jurisprudence should be pursued by means of the empirical methods that the current best sciences have successfully drawn upon. Leiter’s leading endeavors in this approach have shed light on the role and significance of the scientific methodologies in the analysis and explanation of law and adjudication. In particular, he has drawn our attention to philosophical naturalism, philosophical pragmatism and American Legal Realism as major intellectual sources for his naturalized jurisprudence. In short, his naturalized jurisprudence is characterized by a program of jurisprudence that honestly purports to rely upon the epistemology and ontology of law the current best science teaches us. As a result, he tends to recommend a methodological rather than substantive naturalization as a more promising type of naturalization. Still, I argue that there remains room for exploring broader, more comprehensive manners of naturalizing jurisprudence than Leiter has advocated. These manners can best be illustrated by employing the existing and emerging em