Analytical School of Jurisprudence

1. Analytical School
THINKERS

2. Basic Features
 The laws are commands of human beings.
 There is no necessary connection between law and morals or law as it is
and law as it ought to be.
 The analysis of legal concepts to be distinguished from historical inquiries
into the causes or origins of laws, from sociological inquiries into the
relation of law and other social phenomena, and from the criticism or
appraisal of law whether in terms of morals, social aims, "functions," or
otherwise,
 A legal system is a "closed logical system" in which correct legal decisions
can be deduced by logical means from predetermined legal rules without
reference to social aims, policies, moral standards.
 The moral judgments cannot be established or defended.

3. The English Jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
 Bentham distinguished expositorial jurisprudence (i.e. what the law is) from censorial
jurisprudence (i.e. what the law ought to be).
 Bentham reasoned that a system of law that derive its rule exclusively from the clearly expressed
legislative will of a sovereign will produce clearer and more certain laws than the rules generated
by the common law system.
 Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pleasure and pain.
They alone point out to us what we ought to do, and what we should refrain from doing.
According to him, the good or evil of an action should be measured by the quantity of pain or
pleasure resulting from it.

4.  Bentham was convinced that a system of law that derives its rules exclusively from the
commands of a sovereign authority, when measured by the yardstick of public utility, is
superior to the common law system.
 Whereas the former produces clear, authoritative and certain laws, the latter generates a
cumbersome and illogical mass of precedent that serves the interest of the lawyers but not
of the public.
 Bentham proposed the codification of all laws.
 Bentham suggested that the sovereign’s power may be limited by constitutional rules that
constrain the sovereign are merely rules of positive morality.

5.  The content of the law may be established by the sovereign by conception
or by adoption.
 According to Bentham, a law is about conduct – what a person or class of
persons may do, must do or must not do in given circumstances.

6. Austin- John Austin (1790-1859)
 Austin applied analytical method- ‘law should be carefully studied and analysed and the
principle underlying therein should be found out’- and confined his field of study only to the
positive law – jus positivism (‘law, simply and strictly so called’: ‘law set by political superiors to
political inferiors’)
 Austin defined law as ‘a rule laid down for the guidance of an intelligent being by an intelligent
being having power over him’.
 According to him, there are two categories of laws:
 Law ‘properly’ so called and laws ‘improperly’ so called.

7.  Laws properly so called are species of commands.
 Being a command, every law properly so called flows from a determinate source.
 Laws deduced from a clearly determinable law-giver as sovereign.
 According to Austin, a law is a command of the sovereign backed by a sanction.
 Sovereign, determinate human superior not in the habit of obedience to a like superior,
receives habitual obedience from the bulk of a given society that determinate superior is a
sovereign.

8. Thank You