Conclusion

This Chapter concludes the book’s analysis of scientia iuris’ origins and development, summarising its main arguments and trajectory of inquiry. It restates that despite what we have come to believe on the wave of the foundational narrative upon which the Western legal tradition’s consciousness has been forged and promoted, (the) law does not necessarily need, and will progressively be able to operate without, the experiential intermediation of legal experts. However paradoxical it may sound, law’s detachment from the legal expert is due to its nature and operational dynamics as an intellectual artifact to be used for ordering purposes. For, as a product of the intellect, law is a matter of knowledge, not experience. In fact, law’s artifactuality voids experience, including that of legal experts, making it redundant. The key point to bear in mind here is that while knowledge requires an ontic entity, or factical medium, to operate, and while that entity might very well be a human being (or, more philosophically, the cognising subject), knowledge is but information. Accordingly, knowledge is impersonal. Whence it follows that if all that law needs to do its job is knowledge, then the legal expert’s experiential contribution is not required. Importantly, the fading into the background of experience explains, in turn, the crisis that legal education and practice are going through. The Chapter returns therefore to the point made at the beginning of the book—namely, that if we are to understand how law works as a regulatory phenomenon, we ought to explore law’s nature and operations as an intellectual means for social ordering.