Pluralist Private Law Theory: Prolegomena to a Pluralist and Social Science Oriented Legal Theory as a Normative Desideratum ("Normative Pluralism")

Just how legal scholarship and legal practice should address the social sciences and other fields of inquiry is a vital question whose answer is informed by concerns of innovation, logic, and an understanding of law and jurisprudence. Law and economics is an efficient vehicle in this regard, an approach that in the USA is perhaps even dominant. The present article distinguishes between a monist interdisciplinary openness - vis-a-vis a neighbouring discipline that may indeed already have a particular goal and benchmark in mind - and a pluralist interdisciplinary openness. It identifies in the latter a disproportionately greater heuristic potential (in terms of all societal views). In a pluralist society, one that moulds pluralism into a constitutional requirement, the author sees a pluralist interdisciplinary openness as, above all, normatively superior and even mandated. It also seems better suited to the logic of jurisprudence: a discipline seeking balance in society. The article also addresses the biggest "drawback" of the approach, the unanswered and difficult question of how to determine hierarchizations. Adopting a value-tracking approach, the author proposes a mechanism embracing constitutionality and democracy as guiding legal principles.