| Summary: | The law of the future faces fundamental challenges that it cannot overcome merely with “tried and tested” doctrine. Nor can it take methodological refuge in a supposedly apolitical hermeneutic or in a one-sided application of empirical methods. Its tasks are not limited to mere guidance, innovation or stimulating activity, but also critical-emancipatory functions. Methodological reflection and legal criticism – understood as social theory “from within” the law itself – enable jurisprudence to meet the special requirements arising from the fact that jurisprudence is simultaneously part of both the legal and academic systems. The future development of jurisprudence therefore requires a well-founded research approach – one that maintains interdisciplinary links with neighboring disciplines in the humanities and social sciences and provides impulses for enlightened self-criticism and self-reflection. Only in this way – by extricating jurisprudence from its self-inflicted ignorance of its social function – can legal practice assert itself in everyday legal life and counter the injustices of the legal world with its own thinking. Such critical legal thinking requires more than just the continuation of traditions in the history of ideas. Nor can it be exhausted in the mere cultivation of empirical approaches to reality. It must aim to develop, unfold, and write into the future a normative concept of law. It draws its essential reflective potential from social-theoretical modelling and methodological development. In doing so, the mutual confrontation and translation of competing theoretical models opens up new learning opportunities, not to resolve legal conflicts, but to deal with them more rationally. In this context, it is above all the foundational legal subjects which, with their respective approaches and perspectives, open up diverse and flexible approaches to the possibilities and realities of law and, especially in the light of new cases, ensure the necessary variance of options for perception and action. The future of law lies in experimental trial and testing and innovative discovery, in the creative search for alternative possibilities and possible realities, in the critical-constructive struggle for the law of the future – as the ecological law of future life in the next biodigital society.
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