“When Paradigms Are Out of Place”: Embracing Eclecticism in Legal Scholarship by Academic Turns

Abstract

As with the progress of social sciences in which the notion of turn has gradually taken a central position in academic discourse, we have often seen the blended application of “paradigm shift talk” and “turn talk” to delineate the construction of progress in legal scholarship. Unlike “paradigm shift talk” that is based on the sufficient intellectual accumulation of understanding Kuhn’s paradigm theory, the connotations, as well as implications, of the notion of turn have been radically ignored in legal scholarship. Therefore, questions tackling turn’s underlying teleology, epistemology, methodology, and ethics are especially significant and indispensable. As a response, this article delves into the notion of turn in legal scholarship by mainly embedding it in a general context of the knowledge production of social sciences. It primarily argues that the notion of turn is more compatible with the construction of socio-legal knowledge than that of paradigm due to its interdisciplinary disposition. Accordingly, rather than maintaining the taken-for-granted status quo, legal scholars should pay heed to this compatibility in question and employ the notion of turn consciously and seriously.