Editorial: Social Studies of Law and Justice. Perspective and Challenges

Abstract

From their origins in the 19th century,the social sciences have treated law and justices as privilegedobjects, although naturally these were not the first critical andsystemic approaches to these objects that used philosophy since theclassical era and which have been addressed by political theory andlegal science in modern day. Nevertheless, the social sciences’approach to the world of law and the exercise of the judicialfunction differs greatly from that proposed by this normativedisciplines. The social sciences perspective is essentially based onan operation that is quite simple: to consider law and justice associal facts (Durkheim, 2001 [1895]).With this purpose in mind, we mustassume a distanced analytical posture, place our previous notionswithin parentheses, and reject both spontaneous sociology and commonsense evaluations. It is true that, especially in terms of politics,art or morality, there are all different types of obstacles foraccepting the objectivization proposed by the social sciences.