RANAH ARGUMENTASI DALAM RISET-RISET HUKUM: TULANG PUNGGUNG PENCARIAN KEBENARAN PRAKTIS DAN TEORETIS

Abstract

This conceptual-reflective project aims to analyze the role and position of argumentation as an epistemic structure that enables practical legal research and academic legal research to develop, test the reliability of, and account for their claims. The most relevant approach for operationalizing this project is a conceptual approach, through which the meaning, function, and position of argumentation in such forms of research are examined, particularly in relation to claims, interpretation, doctrine, facts, and truth in law, both practical and theoretical truth. The findings of this article are as follows. First, the two domains in which legal rules are intellectually processed, namely the practical domain and the academic domain, both position argumentation as the backbone of their effort to bring together rules, facts, theory or doctrine, methods of interpretation, analysis, and processes of drawing conclusions. Second, whether explicitly recognized or not, argumentation has been treated as a constitutive condition for the operation of these two forms of legal research, so that both of them, especially at the practical level, do not remain merely administrative, descriptive, or scholastic exercises, but become activities in search of truth whose rationality, reliability, and scientific character are justified. Third, although practical legal research and academic legal research differ in their orientation, outputs, and operational fields, they are united by their shared understanding of argumentation as the epistemic lifeblood that enables law to think, speak, and account for itself.