Comparative Legal Philosophy as the Foundation for Legal Reform in Mongolia: Why No Modernisation is Possible Without Jurisprudential Development

The development of legal philosophy is a decisive but frequently neglected precondition for sustainable legal reform in post-socialist jurisdictions. Mongolia exemplifies this structural challenge: despite three decades of institutional overhauls, constitutional amendments, judicial restructuring, and the aggressive borrowing of foreign legal models, the domestic legal order continues to suffer from chronic instability, inconsistent doctrinal reasoning, and an underdeveloped culture of justification. This article argues that Mongolia’s legal reforms repeatedly underperform because they are executed in a jurisprudential vacuum. Utilizing a comparative jurisprudential framework, this study examines how modernizing states construct legal meaning, foster interpretive consistency, and stabilize institutions through the deliberate cultivation of legal philosophy. The article demonstrates how Mongolia’s hybrid legal identity—comprising civil law structures, lingering socialist-legal mentalities, revived customary-normative practices, and deepening engagement with international economic and human rights law—requires a systematic theoretical matrix capable of organizing doctrinal reasoning across fields. Without such foundations, reform remains fragmented, reactive, and formalistic. Ultimately, the article proposes a Mongolian framework of “Structured Pluralist Jurisprudence” that critically synthesizes Hartian legal positivism, Dworkinian interpretivism, Fullerian internal morality, and Razian authority with local normative culture and international obligations

legal philosophy, Mongolia, comparative jurisprudence, legal reform, legal modernization, post-socialist law, rule of law, structured pluralism

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