Ciencias sociales y derecho: las ciencias sociales en la educación legal

In this work I will offer an approach to some of the problems that arise in the relations between social science and jurisprudence. In order to achieve the goals, I will use a linguistic approach following Elizabeth Mertz research about legal education and her reflections about the role that social sciences have on it. The work will be developed in two sections. In the first one, there will be presented some crucial ideas about studies of language use and the translations problems that appear when scholars try to apply social sciences results and theories in the legal realm. Then, I will present the results of Mertz’s investigation about legal education and how social sciences are taught in American law schools. In the second section I will make some critical considerations about jurisprudence and will show some differences when compared with social sciences to, finally, explore the challenges that has to face a legal education that intends to be both independent from practice and, at the same time, relevant to it. I will show, then, some reasons to try to develop a legal education model in which social sciences are not a mere ornament nor a something strictly derive from practice itself.