“Philosophy is a battle … to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.” Wittgenstein

Introduction to Jurisprudence, by the Quain Professor of Jurisprudence in the University of London, is an important work by a widely read author which should leave its mark, for better or worse, on all subsequent textbooks of Jurisprudence published in this country. In the breadth of the literature drawn on; in the attempt to evolve a textbook for students from a combination of readings and commentary; in its limitation of topics, it explores new ground. Its incursions into contemporary philosophy make it improbable that a textbook on Jurisprudence will ever again be attempted in this country by a lawyer who does not also claim to be a philosopher.

Professor Jerome Hall, in his Readings in Jurisprudence (1938), omitted the traditional analyses of such particular subjects as property, ownership, tort and crime, as better left to the specialists in those subjects. Professor Edwin Patterson, in his Jurisprudence—Men and Ideas of the Law (1953), went one further and cut out the analysis of rights. This example is followed by Professor Lloyd, who is thus left only with sections on “Nature of Jurisprudence” and “Meaning of Law,” eight sections on the various theories of law and schools of writers, and a section on “Judicial Process.” Sore as is the need for the pruning of Jurisprudence as an examination subject it is suggested that this carries the process a little too far. It is based on no intelligible principle.