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“Philosophy is a battle … to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.” Wittgenstein
Introduction to Jurisprudence, by the Quain Professor of Jurisprudence in the University of London, is an important work by a widely read author which should leave its mark, for better or worse, on all subsequent textbooks of Jurisprudence published in this country. In the breadth of the literature drawn on; in the attempt to evolve a textbook for students from a combination of readings and commentary; in its limitation of topics, it explores new ground. Its incursions into contemporary philosophy make it improbable that a textbook on Jurisprudence will ever again be attempted in this country by a lawyer who does not also claim to be a philosopher.
Professor Jerome Hall, in his Readings in Jurisprudence (1938), omitted the traditional analyses of such particular subjects as property, ownership, tort and crime, as better left to the specialists in those subjects. Professor Edwin Patterson, in his Jurisprudence—Men and Ideas of the Law (1953), went one further and cut out the analysis of rights. This example is followed by Professor Lloyd, who is thus left only with sections on “Nature of Jurisprudence” and “Meaning of Law,” eight sections on the various theories of law and schools of writers, and a section on “Judicial Process.” Sore as is the need for the pruning of Jurisprudence as an examination subject it is suggested that this carries the process a little too far. It is based on no intelligible principle.
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- Copyright © Cambridge Law Journal and Contributors 1961
References
1 Introduction to Jurisprudence—with selected texts. By Dennis Lloyd, m.a., ll.d. (Cantab.), Quain Professor of Jurisprudence in the University of London. [London: Stevens & Sons, Ltd. 1959. xxiii, 472 and (index) 10 pp.]
2 Lectures (1885) at p. 1075.
3 See the present writer's “An Approach to Jurisprudence,” Butterworth's South African Law Review (1956) p. 175.
4 See The Revolution in Philosophy (Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1956), at p. 107: “There is another kind of thinking which might be called the creative or constructive work of the philosophical imagination. To engage in this kind of thinking is to consider how, without the nature of the world being fundamentally different, we might nevertheless view it through the medium of a different conceptual apparatus, might conduct our discourses about it in forms different from, though related to, those which we actually use” (P. F. Strawson). And at p. 121: “Instead of testing the concepts we actually employ … we may suppose the facts to remain unchanged but the concepts we employ to be different. In other fields invention of this kind is not unfamiliar; it is essentially what Copernicus did in astronomy, or Einstein in physics; they were important, that is, not as the discoverers of new facts, but as the inventors of new ways of looking at old facts. The post-Copernican astronomer was not in possession of new truths about the heavens, but of a new conceptual system for organising the truths he possessed already” (G., T. Warnock). And see the present writer's article in 77 Camb.L.J. 229 and 404 (1952 and 1953), “The Concept of a Lawyer's Jurisprudence.”