Jurisprudence is the study
and theory
of law. Scholars
of jurisprudence, or legal theorists (including legal philosophers and social
theorists of law), hope to obtain a deeper understanding of the nature of law,
of legal reasoning, legal systems and of legal institutions. Modern
jurisprudence began in the 18th century and was focused on the first principles
of the natural law,
civil law, and the law of nations.
General jurisprudence can be broken into categories both by the type of
question scholars seek to answer and by the theories of jurisprudence, or
schools of thought, regarding how those questions are best answered.
Contemporary philosophy of law, which deals with general jurisprudence,
addresses problems in two rough groups:
- (1.) Problems internal to law and legal systems as such.
- (2.) Problems of law as a particular social institution as it relates
to the larger political and social situation in which it exists.
- Natural
law is the idea that there are rational objective
limits to the power of legislative rulers. The foundations of law are
accessible through human reason and it is from these laws of nature that
human-created laws gain whatever force they have.
- Legal positivism, by contrast
to natural law, holds that there is no necessary connection between law
and morality and that the force of law comes from some basic social facts.
Legal positivists differ on what those facts are.
- Legal
realism is a third theory of jurisprudence which
argues that the real world practice of law is what determines what law is;
the law has the force that it does because of what legislators, judges,
and executives do with it. Similar approaches have been developed in many
different ways in sociology of law.
- Critical legal studies is a
younger theory of jurisprudence that has developed since the 1970s. It is
primarily a negative thesis that holds that the law is largely contradictory,
and can be best analyzed as an expression of the policy goals of the
dominant social group.
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