ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one of Roger's best known contributions to jurisprudence: The Politics of Jurisprudence: A Critical Introduction to Legal Philosophy. The chapter offers a critical introduction for undergraduate law students to the theories commonly encountered within a course on jurisprudence. The discourse of common lawyers prior to the reforms of the nineteenth century poses a challenge to any claim that legal practice needs to be closely connected to legal philosophy. In his call for a more sociologically informed jurisprudence, Roger is alert to this hetero-reference: the manner in which law forms its own version of society. Jurisprudence as legal philosophy, with its concern with what is most general about the legal system, adopts structures similar to the system which it is seeking to describe. Conversely, where humans are motivated to seek the operations of a system, communication will continue, despite theories that suggest that the communications which affect those operations are groundless and paradoxical.
