Schools of Jurisprudence and their Relations to the Sources of Law

Abstract

Jurisprudence explains about the thinkers and their thoughts, way of thinking about all the areas of Law like- right and duties, ownership and possession, legitimacy, medico-legal aspects, ethics etc. Schools means Ideologies (Various ways of thinking about a particular subject), Sources of Law are Custom, Legislation, Precedents. Historical school talks about customs only as a source of Law, Realistic school talks about the Judge made law (Common Law or Precedents) and all other schools talk about the Legislation as a source of Law. As have been shown therein the pictorial method.

General jurisprudence can be divided into categories both by the type of question scholars seek to answer and by the theories of jurisprudence, or schools of thought, regarding how those questions are best answered. Contemporary philosophy of law, which deals with general jurisprudence, addresses problems in two rough groups.

1. Problems internal to law and legal systems as such.

2. Problems of law as a particular social institution as it relates to the larger political and social situation in which it exists.

Answers to these questions come from four primary schools of thought in general jurisprudence.

Natural law is the idea that there are rational objective limits to the power of legislative rulers. The foundations of law are accessible through reason and it is from these laws of nature that human-created laws gain whatever force they have.

Legal positivism, by contrast to natural law, holds that there is no necessary connection between law and morality and that the force of law comes from some basic social facts. Legal positivists differ on what those facts are

Legal realism is a third theory of jurisprudence which argues that the real world practice of law is what determines what law is, the law has the force that it does because of what legislators, barristers and judges do with it. Similar approaches have been developed in many different ways in sociology of law.

Critical legal studies are a younger theory of jurisprudence that has developed since the 1970s. It is primarily a negative thesis that holds that the law is largely contradictory, and can be best analyzed as an expression of the policy goals of the dominant social group.

Keywords: jurisprudence, schools, sources of law, custom, legislation, precedents, Jeremy Bentham, Austin