Abstract
Police discretion exerts greater influence over the manner in which people interact with the legal structure than perhaps any other stage in lawmaking. Thomas Svogun’s book is aimed at integrating that discretion with jurisprudence, which he defines as knowledge of the law combined with the virtue of good judgment. The result is a work of normative philosophy—philosophy of police, yes, but also philosophy of law in general.
Svogun rejects the idea that any one of the three prominent approaches—i.e., legal positivism, natural law, or the historical-sociological approach to law—can capture the jurisprudential perspective of law on its own. The front half of his book, therefore, is occupied with critiques of each approach. From this critique, he draws the conclusion that proper jurisprudence requires an understanding of law that integrates all three of these theoretical frameworks. The purpose of the second half of the book is to explain this integrated theory and discuss its practical implications and challenges for lawmaking and law enforcement. This discussion draws heavily on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and, of more modern origin, on the “Broken Windows” approach to policing popular in New York City in the 1990s.
Involved in the critique of the historical approach to law in the front half of the book are two chapters’ detailed summary of the development of the modern police system, the second of which focuses on the history of policing in America specifically. While undeniably important for Svogun’s argument on the whole, these chapters also are of sociological interest in their own right. Indeed, readers more inclined toward the comparative-historical perspective in sociology, rather than to either philosophy or legal studies, may yet be interested in The Jurisprudence of Police for these eighty pages alone.