AP/POLS 3075 3.00

Law, Justice and Jurisprudence

This course explores some fundamental issues in liberal conceptions of law and some of the criticisms of this conception. Jurisprudence is concerned with the study of the nature of legal systems and the analysis of the fundamental principles on which they are founded. It is therefore a theory with two well-defined parts: a descriptive part, outlining the nature, sociology, and history of existing systems; and an analytical part, in which the concept of law and the principles for its justification are examined. This second part is concerned not with what any particular system is like, but rather with what distinguishes law from other social institutions, as well as its links to politics and to ethics. In this course, we shall be concerned mainly with the latter, that is, with the study of the nature of law and its ethical and political justification.