Jurisprudence

3 units

An introductory course for law students on the main currents of thought in jurisprudence and legal philosophy. Jurisprudence, both in the tradition and today, reflects two general outlooks--law as institutionalized power, and law as a species (or application) of morality. As you can imagine, lawyers with a penchant for theoretical questions have worked up a great number of variations on these two themes. Can one reach some kind of conclusion on the question of the nature of law? Drawing for the most part on the work of recent writers, we shall discuss concepts and arguments clustered around the two views--fiat vs. reason, power vs. morality, convention vs. goodness. Classroom instruction is by lecture and discussion. And, for what it's worth, the instructor is in love with the field and does his best to keep things lively and interesting. Nothing is presupposed. The best background is curiosity about these questions. The examination is of the traditional, scheduled variety, but with study questions (from which the actual exam questions are taken) distributed in advance.