Abstract

The paper examines two ideal types of legal thinking that Max Weber develops in relation to continental and 'Anglo-Saxon' law respectively. By focusing on the differences in the training of lawyers, two corresponding roles can be distinguished for the university jurist: the academic lawyer and the legal academic. The former is primarily a thematic variation of the practitioner and defines the university jurist's action in relation to the legal profession: her educational functions centre on vocational preparation, her research is mainly targeted at existing or future professionals, etc. By contrast, the primary affiliations of the legal academic are not legal practitioners but her university colleagues in the humanities and the social sciences with whom she shares a common calling: in an immediate way, to contribute to a better understanding of the social and political world including law through research and scholarship, and more indirectly, with her scholarship, to further the edification of future professionals. Moreover, the legal academic's political affiliations are not as directly tied in to either the judiciary or the practice but to the lawgiver; through the understanding that she communicates in her research, the legal academic provides a politico-logical framework for law that even the supposedly sovereign legislator is obliged to respect. The non-instrumental ethos that the role of the legal academic represents marks the possibility of a radically critical position that is available to the discipline of law if it is understood as a human science. In order to provisionally investigate this radical possibility, the paper filters Weber's sociology of law through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Aron who both provide an account of Weber's essentially 'tragic' and Nietzschean understanding of modernity.