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The United States of America has been the global hegemon of science, technology and innovation since, at least, the end of the Second World War. This chapter traces the evolution of US science and innovation policy, highlighting the importance of national security concerns and, in particular, the fragmented nature of the policy system, as well as the importance of universities not only as performing institutions but also as policy-coordinating entities.

Assimilationism and multiculturalism faced insuperable contradictions. Even ‘progressive’ assimilation suffered from the tension between the substantive liberal norms (particularly equality) it purported to uphold and the illiberal means adopted to enforce them (such as banning the burqa in France). And its inherently relativistic notion of ‘national culture’ was incompatible with the principle of universal norms. Multiculturalism, meanwhile, could only uphold the freedom of the ‘community’ to pursue distinctive cultural practices at the expense of individual rights of voice and exit for those, especially women and girls, corralled within it. It left the majority ‘culture’ unquestioned and unwittingly engendered ‘parallel lives’ with ghettoized living. Both paradigms were overtaken by processes of globalization and individualization which rendered their essentialist conceptions of ‘culture’ obsolete.

The second chapter on what legal reasoning has been looks backwards from the medieval jurists to Roman law itself. The structural importance of the institutional scheme of persons (personae), things (res) and actions (actiones) is discussed as is the use of genus and species as the general basis of Roman law taxonomy. The chapter then goes on to examine in considerable depth the actual reasoning methods and techniques employed by the Roman jurists together with the philosophical and theory contexts in which this reasoning functioned. The relationship between these reasoning techniques and legal literature and texts is equally considered. The chapter aims to highlight several institutional and epistemological characteristics: for example the importance of the legal action (actio) as a starting point for reasoning at a case law level and the reluctance to see the source of law as existing in a set of abstract rules (regulae iuris).

This third chapter on what legal reasoning has been looks forwards from the medieval jurists to the centuries following on from the end of the Middle Ages up to present times, namely from the sixteenth century onwards. This century experienced what is often called the Humanist Revolution. As the chapter points out, the humanist jurists adopted a very different approach to the Roman texts in as much as they no longer saw these sources as timeless authorities emanating ultimately from God but as historical documents. They thus developed an historical methodology towards the Roman texts in order to be able to identify the actual (rather than altered) writings of the classical jurists whom they considered to be true legal scientists. They also brought to bear on the Roman sources ‘scientific’ thinking which involved a reorganisation of the Digest along systematic lines (following the order of the Institutes) together with, in the hands of Doneau, an orientation founded on the notion of a ‘subjective right’. These humanists were regarded as the first ‘modern’ lawyers and in subsequent centuries their rationalised thinking was developed by jurists into an axiomatic approach to law finding expression in the civil codes of Europe. In addition, the humanist jurists emphasised the importance of interpretation (interpretatio), developing many of the techniques in use today. The chapter then goes on to examine the historical development of the common law, a tradition of legal thinking that functioned outside the Roman learning (at least until the nineteenth century).

This fifth chapter continues the reflection on the legacy bequeathed by the history of legal reasoning in looking at the long relationship between reasoning and legal texts. These texts can be broadly classified into two groups: there are those designed for practitioners and professionals and those aimed at students. This reflects a distinction between the teaching and practice of law. One major theme or artefact within this literary legacy – and one that links the teaching books with the practitioner works – is legal taxonomy. Those who teach the law have strived towards a universalist outlook while the professional and practitioner have had on the whole much less interest in the rationalisation of law. This chapter thus examines the relationship between legal taxonomy (mapping the law), legal problem solving and legal reasoning. It looks in particular at the influence of the civilian principle of unjust enrichment on common lawyers and on the debates that this influence has provoked. The chapter also discusses the role and importance of empirical categories.

In this fourth chapter the aim is to identify what might be called institutional models or focal points for legal reasoning which have emerged out of the history of legal thought and reasoning. Six such models present themselves: they are the rule model, the interpretation model, the rights model, the interest model, the policy model and the remedies model. These models appear to be well entrenched in common law judicial reasoning, due no doubt, at least in part, to the influence of Roman legal ‘science’ on the common lawyers following the abolition of the forms of action. Each model is discussed in some depth.