A people's laws are deeply imbedded in its culture. They embody its collective moral reflection, its common understanding of the terms on which human beings are to live together, its customs, its historical experience, and its aspirations for the future. It is perhaps to be expected that Americans should enshrine their constitutional documents, build courthouses like temples, deploy their laws with ruthless practicality, and not take kindly to the suggestion that their laws are less practical than they think. Or that Italians should maintain a legal system like an old palazzo, with imposing staircases you can lose you. breath climbing, bizarre opening hours, a wing or two closed for restoration, and a few kindly people who will sometimes show you where the elevator or the back door is hidden.

It is the cultural range of the subject matter that makes the study of jurisprudence interesting. There are philosophies of law, some good, some bad, some indifferent, but philosophy does not exhaust the subject of jurisprudence, because major jurisprudential questions (for example, what is a corporation) are not philosophical. There are theologies of law also, but they do not exhaust the subject either.

Historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and economists have also made law into grist for their respective mills, but they too have failed to produce exhaustive treatments of the subject. Take these three questions: should the civil jury be abolished; should a husband be liable for rape of his wife; should there be a steeply graduated income tax. No one of the listed disciplines is capable of answering all three. But an adequate system of jurisprudence will have to answer them.