JURISPRUDENCE STUDY NOTES
INTRODUCTION TO JURISPRUDENCE
MEANING AND RELEVANCE OF JURISPRUDENCE
Jurisprudence is an unpopular subject both with students and practicing barristers. In the words of Dicey, Jurisprudence is a “word which stinks in the nostrils of a practising barrister”. Practicing barristers and judges view it as impractical and irrelevant in interpreting legislation and administering laws.
Thus for you to appreciate and make most of your study of jurisprudence, it is important from the outset to grasp the meaning, nature and relevance of jurisprudence as well as the correct approach to the study of jurisprudence.
WHAT IS JURISPRUDENCE?
In its original conception, jurisprudence which is derived from the Latin “jurisprudentia” signified a “knowledge of the law”.
For the Romans, jurisprudence was closely allied with philosophy and must proceed from the depths of philosophy. It involves an examination of the human mind and human society. Its original scope was thus too broad as was exemplified by Ulpian’s definition of jurisprudence as “jurisprudence is the knowledge of things human and divine, the science of the just and the unjust”.
There has been no definite consensus as to the precise meaning of jurisprudence since the roman era. Various definitions put forward by the proponents of the various schools of jurisprudence include
“the science of law... an organised and critically controlled body of knowledge both of legal institutions and legal precepts and of the legal order, that is the legal ordering of society” – Roscoe Pound (Sociological school)
“the science of jurisprudence... is concerned with positive law or with laws strictly so called, as considered without regard to their goodness or badness” – John Austin (positivist)
Definitions may fail to capture the essence of the object defined and it may be more effective to outline and understand the nature and scope of jurisprudence in order to properly understand the notion of jurisprudence.
The difficulty in defining jurisprudence arises from the following factors,
1. It is a term encompassing the totality of law which in itself is a term not free from ambiguities.
2. It is closely dependent and borrows from related disciplines like economics, philosophy, sociology, ethics, politics, psychology, science, anthropology etc. The expressions – Jurisprudence is a “mansion with many rooms”, or “a field traversed by many paths”, refers to the multifaceted nature of jurisprudence.
3. The ingredients that make up jurisprudence are mainly value laden or ambiguous/controversial concepts like rights, duties, justice, morality, law , philosophy ec.
NATURE OF JURISPRUDENCE
1. it is concerned with rules of external conduct of human beings, i.e rules that human beings are required to observe and obey. And by virtue of this, it is related to other sciences that study human nature and society like economics, ethics, sociology, anthropology, Psychology and political science.
It proceeds from the assumption of ubi societas, ibi jus- once there is a society or community at a certain level of development, there is law. It studies methods by which societal pressures and problems are solved rather than the particular solution.
It seeks to construct a science which will explain the relationship between law, and its concepts or the life of the community.
2. It dwells on the nature of the law and its purposes, on questions of legal validity and efficacy and their interrelationship, the interaction between law, justice and morality and the institutional and theoretical apparatus for creation, adjudication, enforcement and modification of law.
RELEVANCE OF JURISPRUDENCE
1. The questions which jurisprudence deals with are of great importance to the organisation of any society and have led to deep thinking and ideas that have affected human thought and action.
2. Jurisprudence exposes the student to the wealth of intellectual contributions of great minds and thus broadens the horizon of the student, sharpens his perception of basic human problems and brings theory and actual life into focus.
Note that the student is expected after an exposure to such an exposure to a diverse collection of theorists and philosophers to take up or adopt his own well reasoned moral or political view.
3. Jurisprudence enables the student to reflect and think on fundamental questions of human existence, of rational and legal ordering of society and of man’s place in the universe. Jurisprudence provides him a basic/fundamental initiation into these philosophical questions
4. Everyone has a personal philosophy which is the sum of his/her ideas and convictions and thus a study of philosophy in general as contained in jurisprudence will help in streamlining this philosophy
5. Jurisprudence deepens the students knowledge of the law, through it critical and thorough analysis of law, and also ... the students logical faculty and proper grasp of logic will then further improve the students command of language. Thus the three essential ingredients of jurisprudence – law, logic and language
6. Knowledge of jurisprudence will also aid a practicing lawyer or judge in cases of first impression or locus classicus cases which raise important jurisprudential questions
7. It promotes orderly transmission of knowledge from generation to generation
FROM THE naijalawcoach STUDY NOTES.
(Proper attribution has already been done to Professor Obinna Boniface Okere in the video, whose mimeographs served in place of the scarce textbooks when we all struggled with the complexities of Jurisprudence in UNEC. He is a genius we all respect for his intellectual sagacity. And also R.W Dias , who preceded Professor Okere and with whose work we later became acquainted. And many others not directly referred to in the clip).
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