If you were asked, “what is the law”, you might be able to speak out: the constitution, the penal code, the civil code are a bunch of laws. But if i ask you, "what's legal thinking," you'll probably hold back。
The law is subject to change, but the way in which legal persons think about issues is a bottom-up logic. This logic has been debated, polished and reconstructed by a group of the smartest minds from ancient times to the present。
The classic collection of legal science recommended today is about what the law thinks. These five books don't teach you how to cross the law, but they take you into the top of a century of thinking across europe and america。
The first book recommended today refers directly to the “presence crisis” of law and the legal person。
Many law students claim to be “legals” who think that they have some kind of superior mindset and social status by being educated in law, and then they must have been laughed at: “law? Isn't that just the flipping of the law? What serious science?"
A century ago in the united states, law was experiencing such a crisis. At the same time, law is primarily a trade, and law students undergo apprenticeships, are familiar with a rich collection of cases, summarize the legal principles contained therein and are eager to show their hands and hands in court. However, some are not satisfied with this, and the growing natural sciences are beginning to lead them to wonder: why can law not have systems and justice as rigorous as natural science
Albert cokulek is one of them, and in his introduction to legal sciences he is addressing the question: why is law a science? He made a “chemical analysis” of legal relations, telling us that a seemingly complex legal world can eventually be reduced to the basic elements and relationships of “rights” and “obligations”。
Like the chemist returns thousands of substances to the periodic table of elements, cokulek uses the words “right” and “obligation” to decompose into the smallest logical unit, creating a vast system of legal science。
If you are suffering from such doubts, seek some answers from him。
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Introduction to legal science
♪ beautiful ♪ albert cokulek
Chongyang translation
Published july 2025
Isbn: 978-7-100-2509-6
Brief description
The book is an integral part of the koculek law theory and philosophy of law and not only provides a systematic presentation to the general reader of the basics of the legal sciences, but also focuses on the core ideas of the author in legal concepts, legal relations, sources of law, legal analysis and legal methods. By advocating a strict definition and detailed classification of the concept of legal basis, emphasizing the atomization of legal relationships, such as rights and obligations, koculek has advanced the precision and clarity of the basic legal concepts, deepened the hoferdian system of doctrine of rights and the framework of rights analysis, and laid a solid foundation for the analysis of ownership and property rights stratification in modern law. The book has had an important and far-reaching impact in the jurisprudence of the united states, becoming a classic literature of american law analysis。
Indeed, the “existenceist” crisis had erupted in the united states as a result of the seeds of german law. The nineteenth-century german jurist, adolf merkel, an apprentice of rudolf jeryn, also focused on the concept of rigour, which later was called the founder of the “general doctrine of law”。
Merkel did something like cokulek. He sought to construct a basic conceptual framework applicable to the legal system as a whole, based on the concepts of “objective law” and “subjective law”. He told us that there was no strict reasoning without precise concepts。
Those definitions of “law” “legal relations” “subjects of rights” that we see today in textbooks can be traced to merkel's work to a large extent. The book is an important key to understanding the structure of modern legal systems and the principles of the rule of law。
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Elements of general jurisprudence
Adolf merkel
Translation
Publication september 2022
Isbn 978-7-100-2089-5
Brief description
The author is adolf merkel, a 19th-century german philosophies of criminal law and law, the founder of a book called “general jurisprudence”, which combines adolf merkel's classic chapter on “general jurisprudence”. The elements of general jurisprudence are based on the traditional distinction between “objective law” and “subjective law” in germany and are divided into two chapters. Chapter i, “objective law”, is divided into four parts: the first is “general description”, the second is “law as a means of achieving its purpose”, the third is “evidence and fairness of law”, and the fourth is “state monograph”. Chapter ii, “legal relations and subjective law”, is relatively simple and revolves around the scope of legal relations, focusing on the concept of subjective law (right) as an element of legal relations and the formation of legal relations。
This is the most classic problem in jurisprudence class. In europe at the end of the 19th century, the mainstream answer was: the law is silent, the judge is a “automated vending machine”, stuffed in the facts, spitting out the verdict, nothing. But a group did not agree. In their view, there must be a loophole in the law, and judges are not machine mouths, but co-founders of the law. The group launched an ideological storm known as the freedom law movement. The success of the storm was recorded in the science of legal approaches。
Turning this book on, you can see a list of names: janie, elish, bondham and their different positions, but there's only one core issue around them: how does a judge conduct a “legal discovery” when the law is silent? Arseny argued that “free science” should be used to discover the law of life; ellich proposed to study the “living method” in which society actually works; bond stressed the need for judicial judgement to take into account social interests and consequences
This collection is not a collection of monopolistic papers, but a map of perceptions that represent the recent transformation of legal thinking. It tells us how many of the ideas that we are accustomed to today — such as the gaps in the law, the need for discretion on the part of judges and the fact that the law is not a closed system of rules — were raised, debated and settled by a little bit。
The book provides an extremely instructive starting point for those who want to understand modern jurisprudence, legal interpretation and judicial methodology。
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Science of legal methods
[e] gianni, wait
Ray
Publication september 2022
Isbn: 978-7-7-100-2139-0
Brief description
The collection of articles represents the fruitful results of the freedom law movement from the late nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century, and the authors ' main research background is the eurojust. The theoretical concern of the book lies in the functioning of the legislature and the judiciary, and in the realm of theory it takes into account jurisprudence, legal sociology and legal policy. The book consists of 13 chapters in two parts: the first part, “issues of judges”, consists of 10 chapters, mainly concerned with legal methods in the administration of justice (freedom of legal discovery) and legal thinking; and the second part, “issues of legislators”, consists of three chapters, dealing mainly with scientific legislation, in particular codification methods and techniques。
Compared to the two books, it's a text of passion。
In 1906, a 29-year-old young man published a 52-page article under his pen name, " struggle for legal science " 。
He fired directly at “conceptual law”, which had dominated german law for almost 100 years. He referred to the concept of judges as a “thinking machine” and called it “byzantine”. In his view, the application of the law involved, first and foremost, a act of will and sense rather than of perception. What do you mean? It means that judges are faced with a difficult case not by pure logic, but by a well-trained legal feeling before they are able to prove it。
In the book, his most famous eight papers were included, including " struggle for legal science " , " the jurisprudence of truth " . It's both the hot blood of the author's youth and the reflection of his lifetime. Reading the book, you can feel a long-standing passion: as it was, law can also be a science that needs to be fought for。
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Fight for the legal sciences
Herman cantrovitz
Lui, yao yao-yu
Publication september 2022
Isbn: 978-7-100-21231-1
Brief description
The book contains eight dissertation papers on the theory of law: struggle for legal sciences (1906), jurisprudence thesis (1909), legal sciences and social sciences (1911), the age of legal sciences (1914), the history of free law (1925), summary of legal science methods (1928), rational criticism of realism (1934), definition of law (21938). These papers, which essentially encompass all the important representatives of the cantrovitz on the theory of law, provide a more complete picture of the basic propositions, the basic framework, the development context, the relationship between the legal science and the realizationism of law, the concept of law, etc., which can be considered as the representative discourse of the “freedom law movement”。
As the last book to be sent this time, delineation like the jurisprudence represents contemporary progress in legal reasoning. Reactions and backslides of rules and experience were experienced, but shawl firmly told you that sometimes a judge has to do something he disagrees with, which is at the heart of legal reasoning。
Friedrich schol, the representative of contemporary forms of new law, did a “reverse to the tide” in the book demarche like a jurisprudence: overturning “formism”. Over the past 100 years, “formism” has been almost a pejorative term, implying a dead letter of law and recklessness. But shawr asked a question: what are the legal and moral and political differences? His answer is rule。
The law is not because it leads to the most just conclusion in every case, but because it has a stable set of rules. The judges' task is first and foremost to apply the rules, even if this conclusion is “wrong” from a personal point of view。
So shawl said a very “hard” sentence: “judges are often obliged to do things he does not approve of.” for example, a driver drives safely at 105 kilometres per hour, but at a limit of 100 kilometres per hour. To be honest, it is difficult to say that the driver “is wrong” on a quiet road at 5 km speed. But the rules are the rules, and when he's speeding, the judges are going to judge by the rules。
Of course, shawl is not defending “old” formalism, and he recognizes the legitimacy of realism. If, for example, the police in one area do not look at small things such as speeding 5 kilometres, then the local “rules” can change. As to how such a rule would obtain “rules”, it would be left to the legal reader to “think”。
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Like a legal person
♪ beautiful ♪ friedrich schol
Lui lin, zhang fei, compile
Published july 2025
Isbn: 978-7-100-25039-9
Brief description
The book is a compilation of 14 papers published over 37 years by friedrich schol, the representative of the new formism of law. These papers discuss “what is a legal reasoning” through many aspects of legal reasoning, or “what is the character of legal reasoning”, and combine an understanding of “the character and essence of the law”. In short, the author considers that legal reasoning is characterized by rule-based reasoning and has the colour of authoritative reasoning, which stems from the “legal nature” of the law, or from the “formal”, “general” and “regulatory nature”. But it only makes legal reasoning constructive rather than absolute exclusive. The author has tried to prove that legal formalism is not a relic of legal doctrine, but is equally alive in the present。
The five books, from europe to america, together constitute a cognitive map of legal methodology. It's not just for you to know what the law is, it's for you to really understand what legal thinking is。
