Legal Scholarship and the Subject Matter of Jurisprudence

The chapter discusses the study of legal scholarship in connection with the “Anglo-American vs. Continental” divide in jurisprudence. There is a remarkable difference between that which Anglo-American legal philosophers generally regard as their subject matter (namely, law and the related notions of morality, authority, and coercion) and that which prominent Continental writers have emphasized as one of the main topics for jurisprudential discussion: not law itself, but the study of law, or legal scholarship. Continental writers have been interested in legal scholarship as it is characteristically produced by law teachers. Some phrases that may be used to describe this type of scholarship are “standard legal scholarship”, “doctrinal legal scholarship”, “legal dogmatics”, and “legal science in a narrow a sense”. The chapter explains why Anglo-American theorists should keep their minds open to the idea that jurisprudence may take the doctrinal study of law as its subject matter.