Jurisprudence

The theory of the nature and purposes of law. In its most abstract it concerns law in general, but it may also be applied to the study of the principles and aims of specific systems of law, hence ‘Roman jurisprudence’, ‘Chinese jurisprudence’ etc. The fundamental issue of general jurisprudence is whether law is simply the system created by human customary practice and legislation: ‘positive law’; or whether there is beyond and above this a standard of legal justice that is not of human making: natural law. This was debated in early Greek philosophy and discussed in Roman jurisprudence in which the case for natural law was strongly argued for by Cicero. This Ciceronian view greatly influenced medieval, renaissance and modern thinkers through to the framers of the US Constitution but in the past two centuries there has been a strong movement in favour of the idea that all law is a matter of convention.