hello everybody and welcome to a new series on the subject of jurisprudence this lesson is going to take an introduction to the subject of jurisprudence talk about some of the ways in which we Define the subject at some of the major theories of the subject the importance of this subject as well as the scope of the series that we are going to be covering over the next weeks and months um on the Law Academy now this is the first lesson to the subject of jurisprudence now we are going to ask essentially the following questions okay we're going to be asking the first question which is probably the most pertinent for an introduction to jurisprudence course which is what is jurisprudence um that is something that is going to be important for for us to explore and examine and to to really get our heads around at the start of this series of lessons we're then going to talk about why jurisprudence is important this is often a question that is asked by law students specifically now because this is an open course to uh for anybody who wants to have a look and and to to watch this content this might be content that is consumed by law students it might be content which is consumed by other students so for example philosophy students and so as a result of this the ways in which you view jurisprudence may be indicative of which subject you are particularly studying for the for a lot of the time and for a lot of people uh the subject of jurisprudence is one that is seen by at least law students as not particularly relevant or important and then at least by philosophy students is considered to be more important so really how you view jurisprudence at the outset is something that can be indicative of your general approach now in as a result of that I would encourage anybody and everybody who is watching this lesson who is studying or maybe has a background in any of these subjects to put in the comments down below straight away what your initial thought process and understanding and attitude towards jurisprudence is at this early Venture do you think that jurisprudence is important do you think it is a a very useful and very important as I said and vital part of study or do you think that it is actually useless not important and it's just a tick boxing exercise that you have to do as part of your University course I'd be very interested to see how these attitudes actually lie on the kind of law versus philosophy Spectrum whether or not you're a lawyer or a philosopher um and I sort of have an idea in the back of my mind already as to what depending on what subjects you're doing what your general approach to jurisprudence will be we will also talk about some of the most important theories of jurisprudence arguably the two most important there is one of them being links to the person who is pictured at the top of the screen here again for those of you who uh uh want to engage with this lesson in a bit more detail put in the comments down below who the person who is at the top of this screen actually is uh and I'll and I'll pin and I'll like and our heart the the right answer at the bottom of this YouTube video and then I'll finally think about and talk about the scope of this series okay so what we're actually going to be covering in this series but also what's important as well is uh well we're not going to be covering what areas of jurisprudence are not going to be part of the scope of this series let's begin what is jurisprudence um now just like with a variety of different parts of Law and different areas of philosophy sociology criminology the concept of jurisprudence in inverted commas isn't one which is necessarily easy to Define um it is a thing that you study and that you understand more than a thing that you define we can get an epidemiological etymological uh definition I.E what the word and the derivation of that word it comes from that doesn't necessarily give us any indication as to how that word is used and how that word is defined in today's colloquial understanding of the English language now things are made worse with the word jurisprudence because the word Jewish Prudence is often used at least within the context of the legal tradition to refer to two different things it can be referred to as a case law so for example if I'm talking about international law public international law I might refer to the jurisprudence of the international court of justice the icj and that would be referring to the various cases and the various precedents that are established by the international court of justice or jurisprudence within the context of the criminal law within the common law jurisdiction of England and Wales again that refers to case law but that's not the kind of jurisprudence that we're going to be talking about in this series that is the kind of jurisprudence that is going to be dotted around all of our lessons on all of the various topics relating to both domestic and international law as well as European law as well in fact what we're going to be talking about in this series of lessons is the idea of the philosophy of law or legal Theory or or or or or legal philosophy however you want to Define it however your University defines it however your particular textbook defines it so we're going to be focusing on the latter of these two definitions in this series of lessons and avoiding the idea of case law talking about the idea of the philosophy of law instead now ultimately if we go to Black Stone's Law Dictionary we can see from Ghana in 2009 that the concept of jurisprudence and this kind of the tradition of jurisprudence that we understand today is sort of born out of the 18th century the 1700s and this will become very clear when we start to look at one of our major theories of jurisprudence this being legal positivism uh we'll see that some of the most important approaches uh from both the legal and the philosophical side of jurisprudence comes out of the 18th century it comes out of the works of people like John Austin John Stuart Mill Jeremy Bentham etc etc which are sort of uh it sort of bridges the gap between law and ethics law and philosophy law and politics and so as a result of which our modern understanding of of where jurisprudence comes from derives out of the 1700s the the late eight at the the 18th century should I say um and despite this however it should be noted that even though our modern understanding and the sort of development of jurisprudence comes out of this period the idea itself of jurisprudence and some of the most fundamental philosophical principles of jurisprudence pertaining to the idea of rules and the idea of laws are actually far more ancient than that the first of our major topics are on the idea of the natural law comes out of the works of individuals such as Aristotle and then into the sort of uh Christian and the christianization and the catholicization of of intellectual of Academia and the intellectual movements um and this is of course what takes place in the ancient times as we transition from ancient history into the sort of early medieval period so even though jurisprudence is a 18th century development shall we say the theories themselves derive and are far far older than that now jurisprudence in this context would therefore be defined as say the philosophy of law or the theory of law or legal Theory etc etc etc and so for all intensive purposes this is actually a philosophical course but it is one that is important for any law student who is also looking to have a deeper and richer understanding of the law as well and this is really where we get into the question of why we should study jurisprudence what is the purpose of studying jurisprudence if you are somebody who is a law student you might think well I don't really want to study jurisprudence um why do I have to sit in a seminar room and discuss the philosophy of law when I could go and revise the the criminal code I can go and revise and various torts cases and actually these are going to be more important to me in the real world as a corporate solicitor in London well in reality and jurisprudence is very very important and it sort of bridges the divide that we could say exists between the descriptive and the normative study of law because the vast majority of your studying of law especially in law schools in and around the world uh as I know in great detail is focused on the descriptive realities of law if you are doing an undergraduate degree in law in the UK for example you will take exams where you'll just be given a problem question and you'll be told to apply the law to that problem question it's a very descriptive Endeavor it is essentially asking you to identify the issues at hand and to apply the law to those issues it's not particularly very normative it is asking essentially what is the law how does the law work how do we apply the law that is essentially it now if you go to maybe a a better university in the United Kingdom or elsewhere around the world you might also have the ability to challenge the fundamental nature of Law and one of the ways in which you can do that is through the study of jurisprudence because jurisprudence and any other theory of Law and legal Theory invites us to challenge the fundamental nature of the law and ask not necessarily descriptive questions but in fact ask normative questions so we could be asking questions such as what the law ought to be what should the law be why is the law right or wrong in this particular context why is one case here more controversial than this other case and then the next question is what fundamentally is the law now you might be thinking well that's a sort of descriptive question why would I why would I be studying that in jurisprudence well when we talk about what fundamentally is the law we're not asking the question as to what is the descriptive nature of what a particular law says so when I say what fundamentally is the law I'm not asking for example what does it say in sections 27 and 28 of the land registration act I'm actually instead talking about law as a general abstract entity what actually is law what does it mean for something to be law what what is the law fundamentally at this deeper and richer understanding that is a question which is as you can probably imagine far more philosophical in nature I've already mentioned the two theories that are going to be cited on this slide already but I'm going to do it again just for the purposes of this particular lesson as mentioned previously in an earlier slide I noted that despite the fact that the jurisprudence that we understand today comes out of in around the 18th century and that in fact the first time the the word jurisprudence is cited in in English languages around the late 1600s these ideas and theories are often based on theoretical approaches to philosophy which date back as far as the Ancients so people like Aristotle and in mind in my mind at least there are two important theories and this is really where we're going to spend the majority of our time studying jurisprudence we're going to talk a lot about natural law theory and we're going to talk a lot about legal positivism essentially natural law theory is where uh seemingly a lot of the early approaches to law have derived and developed and then legal positivism is one that kind of came onto the scene and has had a huge impact and has had a huge influence over all of jurisprudence to this very day so we're going to be spending a lot of our time talking about natural law theory legal positivism the strengths and weaknesses of each of these theories the history of each of these theories as well as the variations within each of these theories coming from different philosophers so essentially that's going to take us to looking at the scope of this series now the scope of this series is going to be looking at the following um the following structure now this is the same structure as you would find in any uh jurisprudence or Philosophy of Law textbook now I'm going to be citing the the various references and citations and bibliographies at the end of each of these videos in the description of each of these videos um I'm going to be following uh two three even four different um different sources in order to to construct these lessons um but ultimately every single jurisprudence textbook or Philosophy of Law textbook that I have seen at least covers these Topics in roughly this order it seems to be the standard a bog standard order it's the same way that for example negligence is the first tort that you study in any kind of torts textbook so we're going to begin for example by talking about natural law theories this is where for the most part people begin to talk about jurisprudence um on account mainly of the age of natural law theory because natural law theory dates back as I've said to ancient philosophy we're going to divide this topic into three main lessons we're going to talk about the ancient influencers the definition and origins of natural law theory we're going to talk about the impact of Christianity on the natural law movement so that means moving into the more medieval part of natural law theory and then we're going to finish by looking at how natural law theory influences influences and impacts jurisprudence to this day by looking at some of the more modern theoretical approaches to the subject we will then talk about arguably the most important of the jurisprudential uh theories depending on where you sit in terms of the philosophy of law this being the concept of legal positivism we're going to be talking about um the origins of legal positivism and the influence of philosophers such as that of Austin we'll also be talking about various critiques of austinian legal positivism the approaches that Austin actually took when it came to approaches relating to positivism we will then talk about the influence of arguably at least in my opinion the most important jurisprudential philosopher of all time potentially that being the work of HLA heart and his approaches to Legal positivism we will then talk in the final two lessons about the critiques of legal positivism which were levied and presented by the likes of dwalkim and then finally the influence of Joseph Raz on the legal positivist movement this does not mean we're going to be finished with these two theories however because we're going to then talk about law and Society law and Society focuses on sociological and post-liberal approaches to Legal Theory this means talking briefly about durkheim and Weber uh Weber not that much given the fact that he doesn't actually cite that much uh about law in his writings because he's a sociologist and then we'll talk about Marxist interpretations of law we're going to keep the Marxist interpretations of law in this section um to just the traditional Marxist understanding of law so we're going to just talk about what for example Marx and Engels said about the legal Traditions uh within this topic because then in the final topic we'll talk about further alternative theories which in essentially Builds on those Marxist interpretations of law by talking about modern Marxist and Anarchist approaches to Legal thought talking about feminist approaches to Legal thought and then building upon both of those and talking about post-modern influences on legal philosophy which includes critical legal Theory as well as critical race Theory which is of course the far the most controversial of all of them at least in recent times um the most controversial of all the theories of jurisprudence and the philosophy of law this is the major structure of this series of lessons and I want to just finally end on what is absent from this series because despite the fact that this is a jurisprudence course we are not going to be diving into Too Deep the issues relating to the philosophy of specific areas of law so for example I'm not going to talk in too much detail about the philosophy of Human Rights or the philosophy of criminal law um this is not because they're not important but it's because I believe they Merit their own subject and conversation their own separate series of lessons because they are far more detailed and far more interesting and potentially after we have studied this General Jewish Prudence course we might go into and dive into for example the philosophy of human rights law because then we can build upon our understanding that we've learned from this course and then start to talk about how that applies to those areas as well in future lessons time