Abstract

The legal scholars Paul Scholten and Herman Dooyeweerd had much in common. The most significant agreement is their emphasis on the influence of a worldview on legal scholarship and practice. Unfortunately, they never met to discuss the similarities and differences of their jurisprudential ideas. In this article I try to reconstruct this conversation which never took place. Scholten’s legal thought is specifically oriented to the practice and difficulties of judging. Dooyeweerd above all was a philosopher whose specific philosophy of the modal aspects of reality is the basis for his thinking about the law. Both scholars emphasized the importance of legal principles. They also identified several fundamental legal categories and concepts. However, their methodology is different. The way religion and morality influence their legal thought is also different. A discussion of the contemporary relevance of their work completes the paper