ABSTRACT
Economics embraced law with open arms but, like a Victorian marriage, it was not a partnership of equals. There is some irony in the fact that, long before the interrelationship between law and science was explored, legal scholarship purported to model itself on the model of natural science. There are several differences in methodology and in discourse between legal scholarship and that of the natural sciences. Natural scientists start from the premise that there is a real world which can be described. When legal scholars - the formalists - aspired to think of law as natural science they also believed that law was ‘out there’ and as such was a phenomenon immune from values, prejudices or conscious decision making. Natural scientists use data. Data are generated, defined and given significance by the academic discipline that studies them. Initially data are a passive subject of research that must be generated by the discipline itself.
