Article

The Architecture of Jurisprudence

  

Jules L. Coleman [View as PDF]

121 Yale L.J. 2 (2011). Contemporary jurisprudence has been dominated by an unhelpful interest in taxonomy. A conventional wisdom has grown up around these projects. This Article, the first in a three-part series, identifies two dominant claims of this conventional wisdom in jurisprudence—one substantive, the other methodological—and argues that both are deeply mistaken and must be discarded. Rather than construct a new taxonomy founded on different claims, this Article casts aside the taxonomical projects of jurisprudence in favor of a project of reconceptualizing jurisprudence in terms of a set of basic problems. In order to identify the fundamental problems of jurisprudence and to make progress on their resolution, an architectural framework for the field is required. Freed from the burdens of the conventional wisdom, the Article turns to putting in place a solid foundation on which a new architecture of jurisprudence can be erected and points both to the fundamental problems of jurisprudence and the direction in which progress on their resolution is likely to be found.