I have just started reading about legal philosophers. How are they different from lawyers, advocates or professors? Would someone like BS Chimni be considered a legal philosopher? Is working on the jurisprudence part or theoretical conceptual part considered philosophy of law ?
Philosophy is a real discipline- you can learn it. There’s conventions and grammars and existing literature and you spend a lot of time reading people who are long dead. And then you write something that contributes to the philosophy of law. That’s how you become a legal philosopher. There’s no big mystery- just a lot of studying. It’s not a status thing - it’s about having the education and making a contribution to the field. Same way people become legal anthropologists and sociologists and legal historians.
people study philosophy- like as a full time degree. they do BA's MA's and doctoral degrees in philosophy. Legal Philosophers are just people who do philosophy about the law, they can be lawyers and they can not be lawyers.
This is what the ugc model curriculum for the BA in Philosophy looks like: ttps://www.ugc.gov.in/oldpdf/modelcurriculum/philosophy.pdf
Here is what the MA in philosophy curriculum looks like: tps://www.du.ac.in/du/uploads/RevisedSyllabi/Annexure-52.%20MA%20Philosophy%20(REVISED).pdf
Stanford, U Chicago, NYU and Columbia U all have decent law and philosophy programmes you might want to look up, look up the professors listed under the programmes and the work they do, look up the courses they teach.
Theres a discipline- theres a method, theres literature to learn and there grammar to learn there.
Its not just "philosophical views" in some loose casual way- its not the philosophy spouted by my uncle after hes had two drinks. Its a real discipline.
1. Legal philosophers are often lawyers, advocates and professors (especially professors/academics, since this profession is most conducive to what legal academics the world over do, i.e., asking good questions and attempting to come up with good answers through research). What is unique about them is that they think about law from a philosophical point of view. They ask questions such as "What is the law?" or "What should the law be?" (or, in fact, "should we be asking what the law is or what it should be? And if we can ask what it is, how do we know what it is, what is the benchmark for knowing that? If we ask what it should be, how do we know what it should be? What is the standard for justifying that? Religious? Or in some other way normative?")), "What does the law regulate and what are its limits? Why these limits and not others?", "How do we know something is law?"
2. The "jurisprudence part" and the "theoretical conceptual part" (which should read "theoretical/conceptual part", actually) could be argued to be synonymous, and yes, that is what legal philosophers do work on. If, by "jurisprudence" you mean "black letter law doctrine" or anything doctrinal, that is obviously different; some legal philosophers don't have anything (almost) to do with doctrine or doctrinal research, while others do, working on stuff at the intersection of doctrine and philosophy. As an example of the latter, take the so-called 'floodgates argument' in English tort law. It is obviously considered to be a policy argument. If you consider Dworkin's interpretivist philosophy, is there a way of conceptually justifying its continued use and existence? That is a classic example of a research question that is at the intersection of doctrine and legal philosophy (to be clear: this is not an original idea, you can read in the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence an article written by Noam Gur, a legal theorist in England, called 'Ronald Dworkin and the Curious Case of the Floodgates Argument').
Sorry, realized I hit send before answering all your questions. I would say folks like Chimni or Upendra Baxi could definitely be counted as legal philosophers.
This is what the ugc model curriculum for the BA in Philosophy looks like: ttps://www.ugc.gov.in/oldpdf/modelcurriculum/philosophy.pdf
Here is what the MA in philosophy curriculum looks like: tps://www.du.ac.in/du/uploads/RevisedSyllabi/Annexure-52.%20MA%20Philosophy%20(REVISED).pdf
Here is what an MA in philosophy curriculum for JNU looks like:
https://www.jnu.ac.in/sites/default/files/CP_MA_Syllabus_Full.pdf
Stanford, U Chicago, NYU and Columbia U all have decent law and philosophy programmes you might want to look up, look up the professors listed under the programmes and the work they do, look up the courses they teach.
Theres a discipline- theres a method, theres literature to learn and there grammar to learn there.
Its not just "philosophical views" in some loose casual way- its not the philosophy spouted by my uncle after hes had two drinks. Its a real discipline.
Heres some places to get started: https://iep.utm.edu/law-phil/
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780195396577/obo-9780195396577-0176.xml
https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=law
2. The "jurisprudence part" and the "theoretical conceptual part" (which should read "theoretical/conceptual part", actually) could be argued to be synonymous, and yes, that is what legal philosophers do work on. If, by "jurisprudence" you mean "black letter law doctrine" or anything doctrinal, that is obviously different; some legal philosophers don't have anything (almost) to do with doctrine or doctrinal research, while others do, working on stuff at the intersection of doctrine and philosophy. As an example of the latter, take the so-called 'floodgates argument' in English tort law. It is obviously considered to be a policy argument. If you consider Dworkin's interpretivist philosophy, is there a way of conceptually justifying its continued use and existence? That is a classic example of a research question that is at the intersection of doctrine and legal philosophy (to be clear: this is not an original idea, you can read in the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence an article written by Noam Gur, a legal theorist in England, called 'Ronald Dworkin and the Curious Case of the Floodgates Argument').