JURIS, a tribe of South American Indians, formerly occupying the country between the rivers Iça (lower Putumayo) and Japura, north-western Brazil. In ancient days they were the most powerful tribe of the district, but in 1820 their numbers did not exceed 2000. Owing to inter-marrying, the Juris are believed to have been extinct for half a century. They were closely related to the Passēs, and were like them a fair-skinned, finely built people with quite European features.
JURISDICTION, in general, the exercise of lawful authority, especially by a court or a judge; and so the extent or limits within which such authority is exercisable. Thus each court has its appropriate jurisdiction; in the High Court of Justice in England administration actions are brought in the chancery division, salvage actions in the admiralty, &c. The jurisdiction of a particular court is often limited by statute, as that of a county court, which is local and is also limited in amount. In international law jurisdiction has a wider meaning, namely, the rights exercisable by a state within the bounds of a given space. This is frequently referred to as the territorial theory of jurisdiction. (See [International Law]; [International Law, Private].)
JURISPRUDENCE (Lat. jurisprudentia, knowledge of law, from jus, right, and prudentia, from providere, to foresee), the general term for “the formal science of positive law” (T. E. Holland); see [Law]. The essential principles involved are discussed below and in [Jurisprudence, Comparative]; the details of particular laws or sorts of law ([Contract], &c.) and of individual national systems of law ([English Law], &c.) being dealt with in separate articles.
The human race may be conceived as parcelled out into a number of distinct groups or societies, differing greatly in size and circumstances, in physical and moral characteristics of all kinds. But they all resemble each other in that they reveal on examination certain rules of conduct in accordance with which the relations of the members inter se are governed. Each society has its own system of laws, and all the systems, so far as they are known, constitute the appropriate subject matter of jurisprudence. The jurist may deal with it in the following ways. He may first of all examine the leading conceptions common to all the systems, or in other words define the leading terms common to them all. Such are the terms law itself, right, duty, property, crime, and so forth, which, or their equivalents, may, notwithstanding delicate differences of connotation, be regarded as common terms in all systems. That kind of inquiry is known in England as analytical jurisprudence. It regards the conceptions with which it deals as fixed or stationary, and aims at expressing them distinctly and exhibiting their logical relations with each other. What is really meant by a right and by a duty, and what is the true connexion between a right and a duty, are types of the questions proper to this inquiry. Shifting our point of view, but still regarding systems of law in the mass, we may consider them, not as stationary, but as changeable and changing, we may ask what general features are exhibited by the record of the change. This, somewhat crudely put, may serve to indicate the field of historical or comparative jurisprudence. In its ideal condition it would require an accurate record of the history of all legal systems as its material. But whether the material be abundant or scanty the method is the same. It seeks the explanation of institutions and legal principles in the facts of history. Its aim is to show how a given rule came to be what it is. The legislative source—the emanation of the rule from a sovereign authority—is of no importance here; what is important is the moral source—the connexion of the rule with the ideas prevalent during contemporary periods. This method, it is evident, involves not only a comparison of successive stages in the history of the same system, but a comparison of different systems, of the Roman with the English, of the Hindu with the Irish, and so on. The historical method as applied to law may be regarded as a special example of the method of comparison. The comparative method is really employed in all generalizations about law; for, although the analysis of legal terms might be conducted with exclusive reference to one system, the advantage of testing the result by reference to other systems is obvious. But, besides the use of comparison for purposes of analysis and in tracing the phenomena of the growth of laws, it is evident that for the purposes of practical legislation the comparison of different systems may yield important results. Laws are contrivances for bringing about certain definite ends, the larger of which are identical in all systems. The comparison of these contrivances not only serves to bring their real object, often obscured as it is in details, into clearer view, but enables legislators to see where the contrivances are deficient, and how they may be improved.
The “science of law,” as the expression is generally used, means the examination of laws in general in one or other of the ways just indicated. It means an investigation of laws which exist or have existed in some given society in fact—in other words, positive laws; and it means an examination not limited to the exposition of particular systems. Analytical jurisprudence is in England associated chiefly with the name of John Austin (q.v.), whose Province of Jurisprudence Determined systematized and completed the work begun in England by Hobbes, and continued at a later date and from a different point of view by Bentham.
Austin’s first position is to distinguish between laws properly so called and laws improperly so called. In any of the older writers on law, we find the various senses in which the word is used grouped together as variations of one common meaning. Thus Blackstone advances to his proper subject, municipal laws, through (1) the laws of inanimate matter, (2) the laws of animal nutrition, digestion, &c., (3) the laws of nature, which are rules imposed by God on men and discoverable by reason alone, and (4) the revealed or divine law which is part of the law of nature directly expounded by God. All of these are connected by this common element that they are “rules of action dictated by some superior being.” And some such generalization as this is to be found at the basis of most treatises on jurisprudence which have not been composed under the influence of the analytical school. Austin disposes of it by the distinction that some of those laws are commands, while others are not commands. The so-called laws of nature are not commands; they are uniformities which resemble commands only in so far as they may be supposed to have been ordered by some intelligent being. But they are not commands in the only proper sense of that word—they are not addressed to reasonable beings, who may or may not will obedience to them. Laws of nature are not addressed to anybody, and there is no possible question of obedience or disobedience to them. Austin accordingly pronounces them laws improperly so called, and confines his attention to laws properly so called, which are commands addressed by a human superior to a human inferior.
This distinction seems so simple and obvious that the energy and even bitterness with which Austin insists upon it now seem superfluous. But the indiscriminate identification of everything to which common speech gives the name of a law was, and still is, a fruitful source of confusion. Blackstone’s statement that when God “put matter into motion He established certain laws of motion, to which all movable matter must conform,” and that in those creatures that have neither the power to think nor to will such laws must be invariably obeyed, so long as the creature itself subsists, for its existence depends on that obedience, imputes to the law of gravitation in respect of both its origin and its execution the qualities of an act of parliament. On the other hand the qualities of the law of gravitation are imputed to certain legal principles which, under the name of the law of nature, are asserted to be binding all over the globe, so that “no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this.” Austin never fails to stigmatize the use of “natural laws” in the sense of scientific facts as improper, or as metaphorical.