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Theory paper

Jurisprudence / Legal Theory

Examined on Jurisprudence — no governing enactment. This paper has no statute behind it: it is examined on the schools of legal thought and on the strength of the arguments they make. Analytical, natural law, historical, sociological and realist positions are each stated in their own terms before they are criticised. Where a point needs a provision — the sources of law, custom, precedent, or legal personality — the Constitution or the Act concerned is cited in the chapter itself.

This page is the map of the paper: every syllabus unit, the leading cases with full summaries, and the exam questions the paper actually sets.

Units

  1. Unit 1 · Nature of Jurisprudence, Law and the State — Module I — meaning, nature, scope and importance of jurisprudence; the nature and definition of law, its functions, purpose and classification; the State — meaning, nature and elements (population, territory, government, sovereignty); and the theories of the origin of the State — divine, social contract, patriarchal and matriarchal
  2. Unit 2 · Sources of Law — Module II — formal and material sources; custom, its kinds and the conditions of its validity, and trade usage; precedent, stare decisis, prospective overruling, the declaratory theory, ratio decidendi and obiter dicta, the circumstances that destroy binding force, and the merits and demerits of precedent; legislation, its kinds, merits and demerits, codification and statutory interpretation; and convention
  3. Unit 3 · Schools of Jurisprudence — Module III — the natural law school and its history; legal positivism — Bentham, Austin, Hart and Kelsen; law and morality and the Indian concept of Dharma; the historical school — Savigny, Puchta and Maine; the sociological school and Roscoe Pound’s social engineering; the realist schools, American and Scandinavian; and feminist legal theory
  4. Unit 4 · Rights, Persons, Property and Possession — Module IV — rights and duties, their correlation, rights in the wider sense and the classification of rights; persons, the nature of personality, the legal status of animals, minors, persons of unsound mind, the unborn and the dead, and corporate personality and its theories; property, its philosophical theories, kinds and modes of acquisition; and possession in fact and in law, corporeal and incorporeal, its modes of acquisition and why it is protected

Leading cases in this paper

Exam questions

Where it sits

Statutes