TITLE OF E-CONTENT

Name of Content
Relation of political science with law

Creator- Sneh Lata

Designation-Guest Faculty

Moderated By:
Prof. C.P. SINGH
Faculty of Law University of Lucknow, Lucknow
 E-CONTENT

Sneh Lata
(Guest Faculty)

This article examines some basic characteristics of the relationship between national and
international law and politics. The subject is obviously much too complex to be dealt with in all
possible aspects here; however, some fundamental issues of theoretical and practical, importance
are presented with special emphasis. For example, there is an argument to be made that certain
checks and balances between law and politics are critical for the relatively peaceful and value-
positive (constructive) development of mankind and democratically organized societies. The
relatively high level of the autonomy of modern law is one of the most significant factors that
define the limits of politics and thus contributes to the constructive development of different
societies.

The study of law and politics is a varied and multidisciplinary enterprise. From its starting point
in political science of studying constitutional and administrative law, the field soon added courts,
lawyers, and related legal actors to its purview. And the substantive scope of the field is broader
now than it has ever been. Although the US Supreme Court has always been the center of gravity
within the field in American political science, the politics of law and courts in the international
arena and in other countries is receiving growing attention, and thriving communities of scholars
continue to explore other aspects of law and courts beyond constitutional courts and peak
appellate tribunals. The interdisciplinary connections of the study of law and politics have varied
over time; but, like the discipline of political science, the field of law and courts has readily
borrowed concepts and methods from other disciplines. Active scholarly communities concerned
with various aspects of law and politics in various disciplines make this a particularly good time
for cross-disciplinary conversations among those in political science, and those in the
humanities, the other social sciences, and the law schools.

The Development of the Study of Law and Politics-

The study of law and politics held a prominent place within the discipline of political science as
academic disciplines and departments developed in the late nineteenth century. It was the narrow
professionalism of the law school that spurred Columbia University in 1880 to create a separate
School of Political Science, the progenitor of the discipline, under John Burgess. The school was
to develop and teach a “science of jurisprudence” that would provide better preparation for the
new federal civil service. Within the school, a distinct Department of Public Law and
Jurisprudence quickly emerged and was only decades later renamed the Department of Political
Science.
There is some points related to relation of political science with law-

The Structure of the Field

There is no single best way to divide up the field of law and politics. Literatures overlap, and it is
possible to view those literatures at different levels of aggregation or with different points of
emphasis so as to highlight commonalities or differences. Indeed, the prior discussion suggests a
basic bifurcation in the field, between constitutional law and jurisprudence on the one side and
judicial process and politics on the other. But this basic bifurcation better reflects the historical
evolution of the field than it does the current structure of the study of law and politics. We offer
below one map of the field.

Jurisprudence and the Philosophy of Law

Jurisprudence and the philosophy of the law is the oldest aspect of the study of law and politics
and stands conceptually at its foundation. Particularly as it emerged from the continuing debates
over the work of, jurisprudence is concerned with the basic nature of law. It has sought to
identify the essential elements of law, distinguishing the realm of law from other aspects of the
social order and other forms of social control. In an older tradition, jurisprudence hoped to
systematize legal knowledge, extracting and refining the central principles of the law and the
logical coherence of the legal system as a whole. In this mode, jurisprudence was to be an
essential tool of the legal teacher, scholar, and practitioner and the starting point of a legal
science. When wedded to normative commitments and theories, jurisprudence was also a tool of
legal reform, identifying where the law needed to be worked pure and how best to do so.

A primary task of jurisprudence is to answer the question: What is law? It seeks to identify the
common features of a legal system and clarify the logical structure of law. To do so requires
distinguishing law from other normative systems of social ordering, such as custom and religion.
Basic to this enquiry has been the effort to identify the conditions that would render a norm
legally valid. Two well-established schools of thought have developed around these questions,
with natural lawyers contending that the legal validity of a rule depends in part on its substantive
morality and legal positivists arguing that legal validity is potentially independent of morality
and solely a function of social convention. Related to this issue are such concerns as clarifying
the nature of legal concepts such as rights and duties, identifying the kinds of reasons by which
legal authority is established and legal obligations are created, and explicating the process of
legal reasoning. Supplementing analytical approaches to these issues are distinctively normative
jurisprudential theories, which are concerned with which legal rights and obligations are most
justified, how best to reason about the law, and the like.

Constitutional Law, Politics, and Theory

Constitutional law is often paired with jurisprudence. The subfields share interests in the
substance of law and ideas surrounding law. They also share an interest in normative aspects of
law. But where jurisprudence is concerned with the conceptual underpinnings of law writ large,
constitutional law is concerned with the legal and theoretical foundations of a particular, and a
particular kind of, political order.
The subfield has long been concerned with constitutional law itself. In this vein, political
scientists have, along with legal scholars, explored the doctrinal developments in particular areas
of law. In addition, however, political scientists have been somewhat more likely to examine the
intellectual history of constitutional concepts and modes of thought, the normative underpinnings
of constitutional principles, the constitutional philosophies of individual justices or historical
eras, and the relationship between constitutional law and broader political and social currents.
Political scientists have been attracted to constitutional law as intellectual historians, normative
political theorists, and social theorists, as well as legal doctrinalists.

Judicial Politics

The field within political science that studies law and politics was once widely known as “public
law.” For many, it is now known as “judicial politics.” The behavioral revolution of the 1960s
shifted the disciplinary center of gravity from the study of constitutional law and doctrine to the
study of courts, judges, and company. The political process by which courts are constituted and
legal decisions are made and implemented is central to the empirical research in the field.
Originally, the study of the voting behavior of individual judges, in particular the justices on the
Supreme Court, formed the core of the study of judicial politics: Why do judges vote as they do,
as opposed to the how and the why of the reasons they give in opinions? What do the patterns of
votes within the Court and other collegial courts tell us about these institutions as political
actors? Now, judicial voting is but a part, albeit an important part, of the study of judicial
politics. Scholars increasingly are taking a broader view, and are attempting to study the
behavior of judges and courts in the political process, as just one more group or political actor
among many others, including other courts and judges, executives, legislatures, interest groups,
lawyers, and ordinary citizens.

Law and Society

Law and society is not a subfield within political science, but rather an interdisciplinary
enterprise that has long invited political scientists to explore a broader range of legal phenomena
and to employ a broader range of methodologies. Law and society scholarship explores the
reciprocal impact of law on society and of society on law—with some scholars focusing on the
role of law as an instrument of social change or social control and others focusing on how social
mobilization, culture, and legal consciousness determine the actual impact of law. With its roots
in the legal realism scholarship of the 1950s, law and society scholarship proliferated in the
1960s with the founding of the Law and Society Association in the United States. Today the field
of law and society includes a vibrant mix of scholars from political science, sociology,
anthropology, history, and law who draw on a variety of methods and epistemological premises.
Law is the set of norms, as adjudicated by a court system, that is enforced by a sovereign state on
those within its jurisdiction, or (public international law) generally accepted by such states as
binding in their relations with other states. The former category includes public law, covering
relations between private persons and the state and including criminal, administrative and
constitutional law, and private law, covering dealings between one private person or body and
another. The Concept of Law, for a theoretical introduction to the subject.

Political science is not the study of law as such, although constitutional law could be described
as the intersection of the two disciplines. Rather, it is concerned with the operation of political
institutions and the exercise of political power, dealing with the realities as well as the legal
form. It also has intersections with sociology and economics, some practitioners seeing all three
as branches of a single social science. In practice, undergraduate political science studies include
much recent political history. Its oldest branch, though, is political philosophy, which goes back
to the writings of Plato (himself a disciple of Socrates) and of Aristotle.

Political science is the study of government systems and the relations between governments
including politics (naturally), elections, relations between countries (diplomacy), government
administration (civil servants), legislatures (including how they pass laws) and judicial systems.
Law is, of course, part of politics and good lawyers and political scientists know that the legal
system is just a part of the political system. However, the study of law focuses on the actual
application of law and also deals with how it is administered. As such, the study of law largely
ignores its relationship to the rest of the political system, although it does touch on it in areas
such as statutory interpretation, criminal law, constitutional law and jurisprudence.

The study of law and politics is as wide-ranging and diverse as it has ever been. Scholars in the
field are exploring a greater number of research questions with a wider range of methods and
across a wider array of subjects related to law and courts than has ever been the case. In doing
so, they have built bridges between political science and other disciplines and between the
particular study of law and politics and other subfields within political science. The field has
long run the risk of internal balkanization, but the opportunities for dialogue and synthesis are
particularly high at this point in the development of the field.