Law as a Prototype of Western Science
The scholastic jurists created a legal "science," in the modern Western sense rather than the Platonic or Aristotelian sense of that word. For Plato, science was knowledge of the truth derived by deduction from the general to the particular.
Aristotle, although he emphasized the method of observation and hypothesis, nonetheless focused on finding the true cause or necessity that produces a certain substance or conclusion; for him, the ultimate model of a science was geometry. For modern Western man, the very certitude of mathematics, the fact that it is based on its own inner logic rather than on fallible human observation, makes it appear more like a language or a philosophy than a science. Modern Western science, unlike Aristotelian science, focuses on formulating hypotheses that can serve as a basis for ordering phenomena in the world of time, and hence in the world of probabilities and predictions rather than certitudes and necessities. The science of the scholastic jurists was just that kind of science. It used a dialectical mode of establishing general legal principles by relating them to particulars in predication. It was not, to be sure, an "exact" science, like modern physics or chemistry; nor was it susceptible to the kind of laboratory experimentation that is characteristic of many (though not all) natural sciences, although it did utilize its own kinds of experimentation. Also, it was concerned with constructing a system out of observed social phenomena -- legal institutions -- rather than observed phenomena of the world of matter; nevertheless, like the natural sciences that developed in its wake, the new legal science combined empirical and theoretical methods.A science, in the modern Western sense of that word, may be defined by three sets of criteria: methodological criteria; value criteria; and sociological criteria. By all three sets of criteria, the legal science of the twelfth-century jurists of western Europe was a progenitor of the modern Western sciences.
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