The search for new methodological approaches in legal research in the context of modern challenges

Abstract

The subject of this article is theoretical concepts and explanatory models used in legal science to identify the essence of law and legal phenomena, as well as issues of the evolution of methodological knowledge in jurisprudence in modern conditions. Due to the lack of adequate tools in classical jurisprudence for describing and researching the nature of new phenomena of legal reality, as well as in connection with overcoming politically and socially determined methodological limitations, legal science is faced with the need to search and disseminate new methodological approaches. New methodological approaches in the social sciences in general and in jurisprudence in particular do not pretend to establish the absolute truth, their advantage lies in the integration of traditional approaches. When considering the problems of the methodology of modern legal research, the author points out the need to apply new postclassical approaches, including the communicative theory of law. The novelty of the research consists in substantiating the impossibility of the transition of legal science to a qualitatively new level of knowledge of law and legal phenomena, provided that it uses the classical (and to a certain extent outdated) methodological optics. Since legal science develops in the context of the development of scientific knowledge in general and goes through the same stages in its development, at the present stage its development may be associated with the application of integrative concepts of legal understanding. One of the most interesting integrative concepts of legal understanding is the communicative approach, which allows us to give a more complete picture of the law, of all legal institutions, as it introduces legal dogmatics into the context of social communication. The communicative approach offers legal science new tools for understanding law and legal phenomena in their social dimension, which is the basis for using it as a methodological basis for current research in the field of lawmaking and law enforcement.