The Relevance of the Sociological School of Jurisprudence to Legal Studies

THE RELEVANCE OF THE SOCIOLOGICAL SCHOOL OF JURISPRUDENCE TO LEGAL STUDIES IN NIGERIA BY ETUDAIYE, MUHTAR ADEIZA INTRODUCTION Jurisprudence among its many definitions has been described as being concerned with “the nature of law, its purposes, the means (institutional and conceptual) necessary to effectuate these purposes, the limits of the law‟s efficacy, the relation of law to justice and morality and the modes by which law changes and grows historically”.1 This is a definition that is almost apt when considered against the background of Professor A.A. Okunniga‟s proclamation at his inaugural lecture2 as follows: “Nobody,” he says, “including the lawyer has offered, nobody including the lawyer is offering, nobody including the lawyer will ever be able to offer a definition of law to end all definitions”. It is this paper‟s view that the abstractness of the word „law‟ and „jurisprudence‟ does not render them meaningless but rather amplifies their meaning. The definition of law has spiraled into many schools which have become subjects of scientific enquiry. In the early days, the notion that principles which were scientific in origin could be applied to diverse areas such as law and criminology owed much to Benthamite utilitarians and was eventually given much importance by the French philosopher, Comte (1798-1857) who gave a much encompassing approach to the study of society and coined the phrase „sociology‟. This gave great illumination to the fact that man like any other social animal was capable of being studied in a trajectory that included observation, explanation and prediction. It is the humble intention of this exercise to proceed into this enquiry, to teach as well as to learn the meaning of the term „sociological school‟ (of jurisprudence), its scope, what it portends, its scholars, its application to the study of law and its effect and perhaps in some way, we could find a meaning that is as indelible to jurisprudence as it is to our lives. After all, we