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37 San Diego L. Rev. 731 (2000)
Theories of Areas of Law

handle is hein.journals/sanlr37 and id is 739 raw text is: Theories of Areas of Law* MICHAEL MOORE** The topic of this symposium is theories and the law. Since this is such an enormously broad topic, the first thing to do is to narrow it a bit. As I shall discuss it, the topic is not on the central topic of jurisprudence, which is the theory of law. My topic is theories within our law, rather than theories about the nature of law in general. Often we call such theorizing internal to the law we have, internal jurisprudence, to be contrasted with an external jurisprudence that is about law as such. Within internal jurisprudence, there is still considerable variation in the generality of the object of one's theorizing. One can theorize about areas of law, as I intend to do, or one can theorize about discrete causes of action within areas of law, developing theories of negligence, and the like. One can also theorize about items as discrete as a theory of a case, as lawyers use the phrase to refer to a basis for recovery in a particular case. Such internal theories can, on the other hand, be as broad as Ronald Dworkin's kind of internal jurisprudence, which is about law (as we practice it in the Anglo-American legal culture) itself. Irrespective of their level of generality, I call all of these theorizings internal jurisprudence.' Such jurisprudence is internal in the sense that * Speech at the Section on Jurisprudence, American Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting (Jan. 8, 2000). This speech was drawn from Michael S. Moore, A Theory of Criminal Law Theories, 10 TEL Aviv U. STUD. L. 115 (1990), reprinted in MICHAEL MOORE, PLACING BLAME: A GENERAL THEORY OF THE CRIMINAL LAW ch. 1, at 3 (1997). ** Warren Distinguished Professor of Law, University of San Diego. S.J.D. 1978, J.D. 1976, Harvard University; A.B. 1964, University of Oregon. 1. On the difference between internal and external jurisprudence, see Michael Moore, Hart's Concluding Scientific Postscript, 4 LEGAL THEORY 301 (1998), reprinted in MICHAEL MOORE, EDUCATING ONESELF IN PUBLIC: CRITICAL ESSAYS IN JURISPRUDENCE ch. 3 (forthcoming 2000).

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