John Searle’s Social Ontology as a Paradigm for Empirical Research of Law

Neo-institutionalists like Neil McCormick and Ota Weinberger brought a significant shift to jurisprudence by viewing law as a specific social fact – the institutional one. This perspective moved away from the voluntarism of traditional legal science, pointing instead on social practices as a locus of law’s normativity. While this approach emphasized the factual aspects of law, neo-institutionalism primarily maintained an analytical and normative stance. Our analysis aims to highlight its potential for exploring alternative paths, such as engaging in sociological and other empirical research of law. We believe that John Searle’s social ontology, from which neo-institutionalists borrowed the concept of institution, provides substantial motivation for such direction. In this paper, we tried to detect those aspects of Searle’s theory of institutions from which themes/hypotheses for sociological and other scientific research of law can be derived, as well as to point out the possible directions of their development.