Abstract
Lawyers are the engineers of the social sciences, and their doctors. Neither is good for reputation in interdisciplinary exchange. Social scientists often show contempt for a discipline that seems too close to reality to meet hard methodological standards, and too much concerned by pathologies that are beyond the reach of their methodological tools. As with many prejudices, there is a grain of truth in this one. But not all law is about making decisions and judgements in the face of a reality that is at best partly understood. The legal discipline has its own methodological standards. For the sake of internal clarity, it aims at parsimony. But modelling is not the legal path to methodological rigor. The legal equivalent boils down to one simple question: who asks whom for what? The law splits abstract problems into a series of cases. It reaches parsimony via the selection and sequence of cases. These hypothetical cases are like histological cuts through the social tissue. The legal discipline starts cutting at cases for which existing legal tools seem particularly wellsuited. If these cases are understood, the legal discipline then starts again with the more demanding ones. It is hoped that the sequence of cases leads to an understanding of situations that seemed inaccessible at the outset.
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