Jurisprudence is the philosophical inquiry into the nature of law.  In the dialogues that Plato wrote, the earliest remaining written philosophical works in the Western world, we repeatedly see discussants debating about whether something is X (e.g. pious, just, known), and confronted with the difficulties and even intractability in answering the question, going a level up, so to speak, and asking what the nature of X (e.g. piety, justice, knowledge) is.  Given that law students constantly deal with difficult legal questions, it makes sense for them to take a step back, and wonder what the nature of law is.  This module is designed to give law students an opportunity to do exactly that.  The kind of thinking about the nature of law that we will be trying to introduce students to is one that is disciplined by the philosophical theorizing about the nature of law in the last four hundred years, and one that furthermore is firmly situated in and motivated by some significant and influential political and moral theorizing that has prevailed in the same period.  Some of the key themes of the module may include: the nature of legal obligations and rights, the relation between law and morality, the place of freedom and equality in legal systems, and the nature of rule of law.    

UCL is proud to be associated with three significant figures in the history of jurisprudence.  Jeremy Bentham, whose utilitarian philosophy underpinned classical legal positivism, is UCL's spiritual father.  John Austin, whose command theory of law was dominant in the Anglophone world for over a century, was UCL's first Professor of Jurisprudence.  And Ronald Dworkin, one of the great legal and political philosophers of the twentieth century, was Professor of Jurisprudence at UCL between 1998 and 2008.  The overall aim of this module is to introduce you to some of these important ongoing debates about the nature of law and related normative issues in the hope that students will become not only well-informed about them but also intelligent participants in them. 

Jurisprudence could be thought more abstract and theoretical than other undergraduate law (LLB) subjects and might appear, on first glance, to lack implications for the practice of law.  But rightly done, neither jurisprudential theorizing nor legal practice is insulated from each other.  Thoughtful lawyers can benefit from the kind of ‘second-level’ thinking that jurisprudence fosters.  The study of Jurisprudence gives you an opportunity to develop, articulate, and assess your views about law’s nature, purposes, and point in an informed way.  And it should be added that serious jurisprudence should always be disciplined by actual first-level legal thinking and practice. 

Teaching:

Part A (the General Part) consists of twelve lectures and five seminars which will take place in Term 1 and the first two weeks of Term 2.  Seminars will cover selected topics drawn from the lectures, but the exam questions may relate to any topic covered in the lectures.  There will be substantial changes in the topics and authors covered in Part A from previous years.  Instead of focusing on the jurisprudential debates in the twentieth century, we will spend a considerable amount of time on the so-called social contract tradition in political and legal philosophy represented by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, before taking up the more recent writings of H.L.A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin. 

Part B (the Big Book) consists of seminars which take place in the last eight weeks of Term 2.  There will be a menu of topics, each of which is tightly connected to and builds on certain themes from Part A, and students will be given a choice to study one such topic.  Each topic will be centred around one important writing or set of writings in legal, political, or moral philosophy.  A selection of topics will be publicised towards the end of Term 1, and students will submit their preferences and will be allocated to one of the options.