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Opening Speech of the Editor-in-Chief and Dean of the Faculty of Law
The end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st century became a time of significant qualitative changes in all spheres of human existence. The world from the bipolar through the multipolar is steadily transforming into apolar one. The fourth industrial revolution, generated by fundamental discoveries in science, has become a fait accompli. The new information era radically changed the society and the place of the human in it. Epochal changes did not end there. The world continues to change. It changes faster and more decisively. All this became the main feature of the modern challenge to law and legal cognition, gave rise to their crisis. As noted by Octavio Paz, whenever the society is in a crisis, it instinctively seeks for answers (signs) in its origins.
One of these origins for the modern legal cognition was the period at the turn of the 20th century. At that time, the scientific and cognitive tradition, including the tradition of legal cognition, survived one of the most acute philosophical-methodological, theoretic-epistemological, moral-psychological and mental crises in its history. Its quintessence consisted in a revolutionary change in the standards of scientific knowledge, at the paradigmatic level. It is well-known now, that a non-classical matrix replaced the classical one. This crisis was fully comprehended by the methodologists of science and most of scientists only in the 80s of the 20th century.
At the turn of the 20th century the methodological rupture of two diametrically opposed approaches to understanding the criteria and standards of scientific methods was also completed in jurisprudence. Completely disappointed in the performance of the classical general scientific standards of scientific knowledge in law, most of the legal scholars took the path of isolating from the single universal science the sciences of culture, including jurisprudence and contrasting them with the sciences of nature. However, they have not yet developed their own methodology of cognizing their objects of study that would be fundamentally different from the general scientific methodology, they have not worked out to this day.
Eugen Ehrlich, whose peak of scientific creativity covers just the years of his work at the Chernivtsi National University (1896-1918), went the other way. He insisted that the true cognition of law rests with the common for all sciences general-methodological approaches. Going in the chosen direction and simultaneously considering the classical standards of scientificity unacceptable for legal cognition, he substantiated the concept of "living law", developed the paradigmatic foundations of the sociological theory of law, discovered in the law the phenomenon of ontological (existential) pluralism and thereby approached the formulation of the principle of complementarity that is fundamental for the non-classical type of scientific rationality. And all that has been done before the physicists-theoreticians did. This is how, he, objectively, has brought scientific jurisprudence closer to the knowledge of the true nature of law.
Just with the aim of helping to overcome the ideological and methodological crisis in the legal cognition and understanding of law that emerged at the turn of the 21st century the "Ehrlich’s Journal" was conceived. It is one more step of the Chernivtsi Law School on the way back to its own origins; it’s an evidence of the irreversibility of the processes of the transition of all national jurisprudence to European philosophical and methodological foundations. The Journal is intended to become a forum for discussions on the above-mentioned problems, a place for lawyers to present new worldview and methodological approaches to legal cognition and understanding of law, new hypotheses and concepts about the nature of law.
The "Ehrlich’s Journal" will develop a sociological approach in legal cognition and understanding of law, will help overcome the dominance of positivism in Ukrainian jurisprudence as a methodology and practice of legal cognition and understanding of law, will be, first of all, a platform for scholars who adhere to the anthroposociocultural approach to them.
Whereas the development of the above-mentioned problems is worked by both national and foreign researchers of law, all of them are invited to productive cooperation with the Journal.
The main principles of the editorial policy are freedom of scientific creativity and academic fairness, comprehensive support for open professional polemics based on the comparison of scientific facts and uncompromising rejection of academic unfairness in all its manifestations.
The periodicity of the Journal is two volumes per year. The "Ehrlich’s Journal" is published in English and Ukrainian, has a full-text version on its own website. All materials submitted to the «Ehrlich's Journal» are double-blind reviewed (The Review Policy).
Mykhailo Nykyforak,
Editor-in-Chief of the "Ehrlich’s Journal",
Doctor of Laws (LLD), Professor.
Petro Patsurkivskyy,
Dean of the Faculty of Law
Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University
Doctor of Laws (LLD), Professor.
