| Jurisprudence

his course builds on foundational concepts from Legal Methods, advancing students’ philosophical understanding of law, its normativity, and its intersections with morality and justice. In Jurisprudence-I, we explore core questions: What is law? How does it relate to morality? How should general rules apply to specific cases? What are legal obligations? What is justice? How do we examine whether a policy or legislation is just?

Through examining influential twentieth- and early twenty-first-century debates in legal theory, including the exchanges between H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, and Lon Fuller, this course critically engages with discussions on the nature of law, its conceptual scope, and the relationship between law and morality. Students will also briefly engage with critiques of the analytical tradition, including perspectives from Critical Legal Studies (CLS) and feminist jurisprudence, which question the objectivity and inclusivity of traditional legal theories and explore the impact of social power structures on legal practice. In its final module, the course turns to debates about distributive justice, offering a brief study of Rawls’ theory of justice and Nozick’s influential critique of it.

While the course offers a focused engagement with the philosophical underpinnings of law and justice, it does not attempt to provide a comprehensive survey of all branches of jurisprudence. It does not engage with debates on interpretation, nor does it cover other fundamental legal concepts such as Rights, Property, Causation and Punishment. Both will be covered in the Jurisprudence-II course as well as in the respective doctrinal core courses. The course also does examine socio-political explanations of law’s operation or its interaction with social structures and behaviour, which is the focus of the Law and Social transformation course. The approach then is to cultivate a sense of the philosophical method through close reading and critical engagement with understanding two central concepts, Law and Justice, rather than by pursuing breadth across the field.