JIIRISPRITDENCE is the science of law, which professes to discuss the principles on which legal rights should be protected and enforced; or it may be called the philosophy of law. This subject has been less cultivated in England than in continental countries, or even in Scotland; for in England the habits of the people and also of their lawyers are too practical to admit of spending time in discussing elementary principles which are more or less vague and speculative. In its literal sense the term means merely knowledge of the law, and seems to have been so used in the Roman law, from which it has been borrowed. The word is often used in a popular sense in this country as synony mous with law, and it is also so used in France; but it is also and more correctly used in contradistinction to taw, as implying the system or supposed methodical scheme embracing the principles on which positive law is founded. A distinction is sometimes made between general jurisprudence, which investigates the principles common to vari ous systems of positive law, divesting these of their local, partial, and other accidental peculiarities; and particular jurisprudence, which confines itself to the particular laws of England, or France, or Scotland, as an independent system taken by itself. Juris
prudence thus embraces a wide range, as treating of all those duties which fire enforced between man and man; and yet it may be safely said that lawyers, though dealing with the results of the science every day of their lives, seldom nive any attention to the latent and general principles on which these results are founded. The only writers who have devoted their attention to this speculative side of the law in this country are Bentham, whose various works abound with these discussions, and Mr. Austin, whose Province of Jurisprudence Determined is an acute and masterly work on first principles, to whom may be added John Stuart Mill and Mr. H. S. Maine.