Jurisprudence

• Semester: Spring 2022
• Course ID: 385C
• Credit Hours: 3
• Unique: 28884

Description

Same as LAW 339, Jurisprudence.

Most of the time when judicial opinions are handed down the focus is narrowly on the facts of the case and references to large philosophical questions are either absent or perfunctory. Big questions like “What is law?” “What is the source of law’s legitimacy?”, “How is law distinguished from force?”, “What is the relationship between law and morality?”, “Is the law an autonomous system?”, and “Is the law gendered?” are not taken up explicitly or at length in the course of a ruling. Yet these questions and the various answers given to them underlie and give shape to the specific arguments judges engage in. Jurisprudence is the study of those big questions and of the traditions of inquiry that have been set in motion by the attempts to answer them. In this course we shall survey the major traditions of inquiry with a view to understanding how even the most minute and apparently local issues in law reflect long-standing and unresolved controversies.

Topics of investigation will include Natural Law, Positive Law, Legal Realism, Law and Economics, Legal Interpretation, Feminist Jurisprudence, Critical Race Theory, Gay Legal Theory, Postmodernism and the Law, Legal Pragmatism.