Law is a set, or structure, of rules that could be said to be the foundation of any human society or civilization. Everyone has at least a basic idea of what the law and the legal system entails; The popular view is that the legal system is a collection of courts, judges, the police, and other people in authority who enforce the rules according to the law that has been previously agreed upon and written as a guide.
Today, as society changes and evolves, changing beliefs and the prevalence of new age thinking have caused us to question the very nature of law, and also its very necessity. For example, should the law allow two same-sex adults to marry each other? Should criminals be executed? Should people be allowed to take their own lives? To deal with any crisis, it is imperative that everyone has at least a brief idea about the philosophical discipline that helps develop law, called jurisprudence.
Case law can be divided into two main categories, Normative and Analytical. Normative jurisprudence questions the moral foundations of law, and can be described as the reasoning for which we punish. For example, should a human being have the power to kill another even under the word of the law? There can be no correct answer. Normative jurisprudence is also concerned with what the law should look like and whether someone should be punished.
Analytical jurisprudence, as its name suggests, deals with the law in all its aspects. Analytical jurisprudence allows us to study the various legal systems, carefully determine their operation, helps to differentiate laws from regulations if there is any difference, etc. Analytical jurisprudence does not deal with morality; instead, it deals with analyzing the current legal system.
