Abstract
As with the progress of social sciences in which the notion of turn has gradually taken a central position in academic discourse, we have often seen the blended application of “paradigm shift talk” and “turn talk” to delineate the construction of progress in legal scholarship. Unlike “paradigm shift talk” that is based on the sufficient intellectual accumulation of understanding Kuhn’s paradigm theory, the connotations, as well as implications, of the notion of turn have been radically ignored in legal scholarship. Therefore, questions tackling turn’s underlying teleology, epistemology, methodology, and ethics are especially significant and indispensable. As a response, this article delves into the notion of turn in legal scholarship by mainly embedding it in a general context of the knowledge production of social sciences. It primarily argues that the notion of turn is more compatible with the construction of socio-legal knowledge than that of paradigm due to its interdisciplinary disposition. Accordingly, rather than maintaining the taken-for-granted status quo, legal scholars should pay heed to this compatibility in question and employ the notion of turn consciously and seriously.
Highlights
In recent decades, the notion of “turn” has gradually taken a central position in academic discourse
After elaborating on the notion of turn, the remaining sections aim to expound the idea that is premised on the division of dogmatic legal studies and socio-legal studies, and that argues that the former inclines to apply the paradigm concept(s), whereas the notion of turn is more compatible with the latter
Unlike the proliferation of paradigm concepts in legal dogmatics, the soil of law and society scholarship inclines to host the germination of the notion of turn
Summary
The notion of “turn” has gradually taken a central position in academic discourse (see, inter alia, Bachmann-Medick 2016). Law is not exempt from the surge of academic turns, and the notion of turn has already permeated various facets of our legal world, including both practice and scholarship. This means that the choice between the concept of paradigm and the concept of turn has certain epistemological and methodological implications for law and legal scholarship (see, e.g., Dore 2007; Teubner 1990) These implications can, to a large extent, explain how the “exciting times for legal scholarship” (Vranken 2012) have been formulated through a process of entertaining plural modes of scientific progress such as the normativist, realistic, argumentativist, technological, and critical modes This article is concluded with implications of the notion of turn for eclecticism that has bolstered socio-legal research
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