LEGAL SCIENCE AND REGULATORY REFORM IN SERBIA: ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK

Governments are faced with a challenge of constant and continuous updating and reforming of regulatory framework in their countries to keep up with the rapidly changing world. Ideally, this process should be underpinned by an evidence-based policy-making approach. Over the past years, Serbia has taken a number of steps in an effort to consolidate the legislative process and ensure a systemic approach founded on evidence-based policy-making, entailing a more prominent role of legal science (and other social sciences) in the policy-making and legislative process. The current paper examines the hypothesis that the Serbian regulatory framework provides strategic incentives for a prominent role of legal science in regulatory reform in Serbia. There is not a univocal definition of 'legal science, hence, it is often disputable, whether a particular discipline meets the requirements to fit into the legal science realm. `I he authors try to address this ambiguity and to coin a tailored definition of legal science, which will serve to determine against which background the hypothesis is examined. The authors apply the broad concept of legal science, which is distinguished from other non-scientific activities in a mode mainly proposed by defenders of the argumentativist model. The authors go on to explore whether the determination of legal science as modelled by the international standards and national regulatory framework of Serbia fits into the definition of the legal science proposed in this paper. A particular emphasis is to be placed on the potential and already achieved opportunity for legal scholars to make social and economic impact through enhancing the quality of national regulatory framework. Further, the authors critically assess the new regulatory framework governing science and research in Serbia from this standpoint, pointing out to the lack of a systemic approach and the "cherry picking" in regulatory solutions. The authors condude that indicators for assessing the real impact made by activities of legal scholars are not sufficient. Consequently, they offer three different sets of activities that should be dearly included in the notion of legal science and consequently valorised as contributions of legal scholars to the social and economic development.