Editorial Introduction to Volume on:
Legal Practice and Societal Complexity, and a Global University System
(GUS) of World-wide Peace
Dorien DeTombe
Cor van
Dijkum
Chief Editors
In this volume we will address two
subjects: one on legal practice and societal complexity in a special on Dutch
Law of Dr. Antoinette Muntjewerff and one on global
warming and global peace of Prof. Dr. Takeshi Utsumi.
The article on legal practice and
societal complexity refers to the methods and tools legal practitioners use to
approach their object. In the legal field methodology is not much elaborated and
does not get much attention. A pioneer in this field is Antoinette Muntjewerff who
addresses already for some decades methods on legal problem handling by
students, lawyers and judges. In her article “Methods in Jurisprudence and
Legal Practice” she addresses an important issue of the ongoing discussion in
jurisprudence and legal practice on the lack of scientific status and the lack of
a legal methodology in jurisprudence and in legal practice. She approaches the
subject of methods in jurisprudence and legal practice a social science
research way by raising the research questions: What do legal scientists and
legal practitioners do? How do legal scientists and practitioners perform these
tasks? For classifying the tasks she uses methods from computer science. The
methods of the legal science and legal practice mostly
remain implicit. This is an ongoing problem by doing scientific research in
law. It also is a problem for legal practitioners. In this article Muntjewerff
introduces an approach to explicit the methods that are used. Legal practitioners
have to perform a series of tasks, in order to arrange this she makes a distinction between the ‘ideal
world’ and the ‘real world’. Within these worlds she distinguishes three levels
of abstraction. In this model the tasks of the legal practitioners can be
classified. Classifying a task is the first step to make methods explicit. The next
step is to analyze the task. For analyzing the tasks methods from the field of computer
science are taken. An example of constructing a legal solution for a problem is
given to illustrate the classifying and task analysis of one of the central
tasks of a legal practitioner.
We are
delighted that we have the opportunity to publish some of the interesting plans
for changing the world into a better place by publishing the ideas of Prof. Dr
Takeshi Utsumi. In his article he gives indications to mitigate global warming
and to come to a more sustainable and peaceful society. He selects major world-wide complex societal
problems: climate change and wars. He indicates
that an answer to these threats have to come from science. The scientists and
the universities should cooperate in order to establish this goal.
Prof. Dr
Takeshi Utsumi does practice what he preaches. He has dedicated a large part of
his scientific time to accomplish this goal. He started a global university in
which highly qualified scientists all over the world cooperate on real life projects
such as Gaz project in Russia. It is very important to have persons who have energy,
the guts, and the idea to improve the quality of living. At first side his
approach might seems utopian. Yes indeed the world is ruled by money,
selfishness, anger and greed, and the ones who are in power are usually not willing
to share the power of the benefits or the money. Nevertheless a better world is
needed and this could start by having good ideas of cooperation instead of
fighting and competitiveness. As Takeshi says: ’A Global University in which
the knowledge can be world–wide helps to understand mutual cultures and might
lead to world-wide peace.’ We are happy to publish these interesting ideas as a
scientific article of Takeshi, slightly edited by the main editors of this
journal.
We are
looking forward to the reactions on both articles.
Amsterdam,
2009