hello everybody and welcome to a newseries on the subject of jurisprudencethis lesson is going to take anintroduction to the subject ofjurisprudence talk about some of theways in which we Define the subject atsome of the major theories of thesubject the importance of this subjectas well as the scope of the series thatwe are going to be covering over thenext weeks and months um on the LawAcademy now this is the first lesson to
Questions
the subject of jurisprudence now we aregoing to ask essentially the followingquestions okay we’re going to be askingthe first question which is probably themost pertinent for an introduction tojurisprudence course which is what isjurisprudenceum that is something that is going to beimportant for for us to explore andexamine and to to really get our headsaround at the start of this series oflessonswe’re then going to talk about whyjurisprudence is important this is oftena question that is asked by law studentsspecifically now because this is an opencourse to uh for anybody who wants tohave a look and and to to watch thiscontent this might be content that isconsumed by law students it might becontent which is consumed by otherstudents so for example philosophystudents and so as a result of this theways in which you view jurisprudence maybe indicative of which subject you areparticularly studying for the for a lotof the time and for a lot of people uhthe subject of jurisprudence is one thatis seen by at least law students as notparticularly relevant or important andthen at least by philosophy students isconsidered to be more important soreally how you view jurisprudence at theoutset is something that can beindicative of your general approach nowin as a result of that I would encourageanybody and everybody who is watchingthis lesson who is studying or maybe hasa background in any of these subjects toput in the comments down below straightaway what your initial thought processand understanding and attitudetowards jurisprudence is at this earlyVenture do you think that jurisprudenceis important do you think it is a a veryuseful and very important as I said andvital part of study or do you think thatit is actually useless not important andit’s just a tick boxing exercise thatyou have to do as part of yourUniversity course I’d be very interestedto see how these attitudes actually lieon the kind of law versus philosophySpectrum whether or not you’re a lawyeror a philosopherum and I sort of have an idea in theback of my mind already as to whatdepending on what subjects you’re doingwhat your general approach tojurisprudence will bewe will also talk about some of the mostimportant theories of jurisprudencearguably the two most important there isone of them being links to the personwho is pictured at the top of the screenhere againfor those of you who uh uh want toengage with this lesson in a bit moredetail put in the comments down belowwho the person who is at the top of thisscreen actually is uh and I’ll and I’llpin and I’ll like and our heart the theright answer at the bottom of thisYouTube videoand then I’ll finally think about andtalk about the scope of this series okayso what we’re actually going to becovering in this series but also what’simportant as well is uh well we’re notgoing to be covering what areas ofjurisprudence are not going to be partof the scope of this series
What is jurisprudence
let’s begin what is jurisprudenceum now just like with a variety ofdifferent parts of Law and differentareas of philosophy sociologycriminology the concept of jurisprudencein inverted commas isn’t one which isnecessarily easy to Defineum it is a thing that you study and thatyou understand more than a thing thatyou define we can get an epidemiologicaletymological uh definition I.E what theword and the derivation of that word itcomes from that doesn’t necessarily giveus any indication as to how that word isused and how that word is defined intoday’s colloquial understanding of theEnglish languagenow things are made worse with the wordjurisprudence because the word JewishPrudence is often used at least withinthe context of the legal tradition torefer to two different things it can bereferred to as a case law so for exampleif I’m talking about international lawpublic international law I might referto the jurisprudence of theinternational court of justice the icjand that would be referring to thevarious cases and the various precedentsthat are established by theinternational court of justice orjurisprudence within the context of thecriminal law within the common lawjurisdiction of England and Wales againthat refers to case law but that’s notthe kind of jurisprudence that we’regoing to be talking about in this seriesthat is the kind of jurisprudence thatis going to be dotted around all of ourlessons on all of the various topicsrelating to both domestic andinternational law as well as Europeanlaw as wellin fact what we’re going to be talkingabout in this series of lessons is theidea of the philosophy of law or legalTheory or or or or or legal philosophyhowever you want to Define it howeveryour University defines it however yourparticular textbook defines itso we’re going to be focusing on thelatter of these two definitions in thisseries of lessons and avoiding the ideaof case law talking about the idea ofthe philosophy of law instead now
History of jurisprudence
ultimately if we go to Black Stone’s LawDictionary we can see from Ghana in 2009that the concept of jurisprudence andthis kind of the tradition ofjurisprudence that we understand todayis sort of born out of the 18th centurythe 1700s and this will become veryclear when we start to look at one ofour major theories of jurisprudence thisbeing legal positivism uh we’ll see thatsome of the most important approaches uhfrom both the legal and thephilosophical side of jurisprudencecomes out of the 18th century it comesout of the works of people like JohnAustin John Stuart Mill Jeremy Benthametc etc which are sort of uh it sort ofbridges the gap between law and ethicslaw and philosophy law and politics andso as a result of which our modernunderstanding of of where jurisprudencecomes from derives out of the 1700s thethe late eight at the the 18th centuryshould I sayum and despite this however it should benoted that even though our modernunderstanding and the sort ofdevelopment of jurisprudence comes outof this period the idea itself ofjurisprudence and some of the mostfundamental philosophical principles ofjurisprudence pertaining to the idea ofrules and the idea of laws are actuallyfar more ancient than that the first ofour major topics are on the idea of thenatural law comes out of the works ofindividuals such as Aristotle and theninto the sort of uh Christian and thechristianization and the catholicizationof of intellectual of Academia and theintellectual movementsum and this is of course what takesplace in the ancient times as wetransition from ancient history into thesort of early medieval periodso even though jurisprudence is a 18thcentury development shall we say thetheories themselves derive and are farfar older than thatnow jurisprudence in this context wouldtherefore be defined as say thephilosophy of law or the theory of lawor legal Theory etc etc etc and so forall intensive purposes this is actuallya philosophical course but it is onethat is important for any law studentwho is also looking to have a deeper andricher understanding of the law as well
Why study jurisprudence
and this is really where we get into thequestion of why we should studyjurisprudence what is the purpose ofstudying jurisprudence if you aresomebody who is a law student you mightthink well I don’t really want to studyjurisprudenceum why do I have to sit in a seminarroom and discuss the philosophy of lawwhen I could go and revise the thecriminal code I can go and revise andvarious torts cases and actually theseare going to be more important to me inthe real world as a corporate solicitorin London well in realityand jurisprudence is very very importantand it sort of bridges the divide thatwe could say exists between thedescriptive and the normative study oflaw because the vast majority of yourstudying of law especially in lawschools in and around the world uh as Iknow in great detail is focused on thedescriptive realities of law if you aredoing an undergraduate degree in law inthe UK for example you will take examswhere you’ll just be given a problemquestion and you’ll be told to apply thelaw to that problem question it’s a verydescriptive Endeavor it is essentiallyasking you to identify the issues athand and to apply the law to thoseissues it’s not particularly verynormative it is asking essentially whatis the law how does the law work how dowe apply the law that is essentially itnow if you go to maybe a a betteruniversity in the United Kingdom orelsewhere around the world you mightalso have the ability to challenge thefundamental nature of Law and one of theways in which you can do that is throughthe study of jurisprudence becausejurisprudence and any other theory ofLaw and legal Theory invites us tochallenge the fundamental nature of thelaw and ask not necessarily descriptivequestions but in fact ask normativequestions so we could be askingquestions such as what the law ought tobe what should the law be why is the lawright or wrong in this particularcontext why is one case here morecontroversial than this other case andthen the next question is whatfundamentally is the law now you mightbe thinking well that’s a sort ofdescriptive question why would I whywould I be studying that injurisprudence well when we talk aboutwhat fundamentally is the law we’re notasking the question as to what is thedescriptive nature of what a particularlaw says so when I say whatfundamentally is the law I’m not askingfor example what does it say in sections27 and 28 of the land registration actI’m actually instead talking about lawas a general abstract entity whatactually is law what does it mean forsomething to be law what what is the lawfundamentally at this deeper and richerunderstanding that is a question whichis as you can probably imagine far morephilosophical in natureI’ve already mentioned the two theoriesthat are going to be cited on this slidealready but I’m going to do it againjust for the purposes of this particularlesson as mentioned previously in anearlier slide I noted that despite thefact that the jurisprudence that weunderstand today comes out of in aroundthe 18th century and that in fact thefirst time the the word jurisprudence iscited in in English languages around thelate 1600s these ideas and theories areoften based on theoretical approaches tophilosophy which date back as far as theAncients so people like Aristotle and inmind in my mind at least there are twoimportant theories and this is reallywhere we’re going to spend the majorityof our time studying jurisprudence we’regoing to talk a lot about natural lawtheory and we’re going to talk a lotabout legal positivismessentially natural law theory is whereuh seemingly a lot of the earlyapproaches to law have derived anddeveloped and then legal positivism isone that kind of came onto the scene andhas had a huge impact and has had a hugeinfluence over all of jurisprudence tothis very dayso we’re going to be spending a lot ofour time talking about natural lawtheory legal positivism the strengthsand weaknesses of each of these theoriesthe history of each of these theories aswell as the variations within each ofthese theories coming from differentphilosophersso
Scope of the series
essentially that’s going to take us tolooking at the scope of this series nowthe scope of this series is going to belooking at the followingum the following structure now this isthe same structure as you would find inany uh jurisprudence or Philosophy ofLaw textbook now I’m going to be citingthe the various references and citationsand bibliographies at the end of each ofthese videos in the description of eachof these videosum I’m going to be following uh twothree even four differentum different sources in order to toconstruct these lessonsum but ultimately every singlejurisprudence textbook or Philosophy ofLaw textbook that I have seen at leastcovers these Topics in roughly thisorder it seems to be the standard a bogstandard order it’s the same way thatfor example negligence is the first tortthat you study in any kind of tortstextbookso we’re going to begin for example bytalking about natural law theories thisis where for the most part people beginto talk about jurisprudenceum on account mainly of the age ofnatural law theory because natural lawtheory dates back as I’ve said toancient philosophy we’re going to dividethis topic into three main lessons we’regoing to talk about the ancientinfluencers the definition and originsof natural law theory we’re going totalk about the impact of Christianity onthe natural law movement so that meansmoving into the more medieval part ofnatural law theory and then we’re goingto finish by looking at how natural lawtheory influences influences and impactsjurisprudence to this day by looking atsome of the more modern theoreticalapproaches to the subjectwe will then talk about arguably themost important of the jurisprudential uhtheories depending on where you sit interms of the philosophy of law thisbeing the concept of legal positivismwe’re going to be talking aboutum the origins of legal positivism andthe influence of philosophers such asthat of Austin we’ll also be talkingabout various critiques of austinianlegal positivism the approaches thatAustin actually took when it came toapproaches relating to positivism wewill then talk about the influence ofarguably at least in my opinion the mostimportant jurisprudential philosopher ofall time potentially that being the workof HLA heart and his approaches to Legalpositivism we will then talk in thefinal two lessons about the critiques oflegal positivism which were levied andpresented by the likes of dwalkim andthen finally the influence of Joseph Razon the legal positivist movement thisdoes not mean we’re going to be finishedwith these two theories however becausewe’re going to then talk about law andSociety law and Society focuses onsociological and post-liberal approachesto Legal Theory this means talkingbriefly about durkheim and Weber uhWeber not that much given the fact thathe doesn’t actually cite that much uhabout law in his writings because he’s asociologist and then we’ll talk aboutMarxist interpretations of law we’regoing to keep the Marxistinterpretations of law in this sectionum to just the traditional Marxistunderstanding of law so we’re going tojust talk about what for example Marxand Engels said about the legalTraditions uh within this topic becausethen in the final topic we’ll talk aboutfurther alternative theories which inessentially Builds on those Marxistinterpretations of law by talking aboutmodern Marxist and Anarchist approachesto Legal thought talking about feministapproaches to Legal thought and thenbuilding upon both of those and talkingabout post-modern influences on legalphilosophy which includes critical legalTheory as well as critical race Theorywhich is of course the far the mostcontroversial of all of them at least inrecent timesum the most controversial of all thetheories of jurisprudence and thephilosophy of lawthis is the major structure of thisseries of lessons and I want to justfinally end on what is absent from thisseries because despite the fact thatthis is a jurisprudence course we arenot going to be diving into Too Deep theissues relating to the philosophy ofspecific areas of law so for example I’mnot going to talk in too much detailabout the philosophy of Human Rights orthe philosophy of criminal lawum this is not because they’re notimportant but it’s because I believethey Merit their own subject andconversation their own separate seriesof lessons because they are far moredetailed and far more interesting andpotentially after we have studied thisGeneral Jewish Prudence course we mightgo into and dive into for example thephilosophy of human rights law becausethen we can build upon our understandingthat we’ve learned from this course andthen start to talk about how thatapplies to those areas as well in futurelessons time