라이터(B. Leiter)의 자연화된 법리학의 의의와 사상적 원천

This article concerns itself with “naturalism” or “naturalization” as a new approach in jurisprudence. Naturalized jurisprudence is, above all, a rejoinder to the fundamental limitations of the Hartian analytic jurisprudence that has governed the Anglophone jurisprudential scholarship since the mid 20th century. Thus, naturalized jurisprudence as an alternative to analytical jurisprudence claims that those features ought to be replaced by the “contingent findings” obtained by empirical sciences. Today, with the striking achievements of science, the realm of law is not free from their deep invasion, both in the academe and in the practice. Given this landscape, naturalized jurisprudence is a philosophical and general response to this trend. The most ardent and leading champion of this attempt is an American philosopher of law, Brian Leiter. The main intellectual background of Leiter’s naturalized jurisprudence is three-fold: philosophical naturalism, philosophical pragmatism and (American) Legal Realism. First, Leiter’s naturalized jurisprudence employs Quine’s naturalism that philosophy is continuous with empirical sciences, the former being replaceable by the latter. Second, it seeks a theory of adjudication that successfully serves the pragmatic purposes such as prediction about judges’ decision-making. Third, it tries to revive and develop some, if not all, Legal Realists’ attempt to offer a descriptive and causal-explanatory account of adjudication. Thus the core of these three doctrines is “scientism” of some sort, whose nature needs a further exploration.