Second Thoughts about the Evaluation of Legal Journals and the Dispute on the Essence of Law
The Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education made public a new evaluation of legal journals at the end of 2015. How much algorithmic and quantitative criteria of the evaluation are relevant to what is expected from legal journals? The answer could be tendered only by a resolution of the dispute on the essence of law. In order to start with the general criteria concerning the evaluation of legal science, the authors focus on two issues. They present how productive the tradition of Roman law is as against contemporary continental legal systems, and how autonomy and pragmatism dominated the development of the tradition of American common law. They prove how irrelevant declarations of journals founders are to the actual discussion in the journals: they are never to be an instrument of research policy as observed in longer periods of time. Bibliometric success of American journals, e.g. “Harvard Law Review” and “Yale Law Journal”, proves that the autonomy of legal science always prevails over dreams of treating legal journals in a purely instrumental way. The conclusions concentrate on how the journals make participants of disputes on the essence of law moderate and better instructed. The article is written for the fifth anniversary of “Forum Prawnicze”.
 Dajczak_FLB.pdf | 621 kB |
