Prolegomenon to a Southern Jurisprudence

It is good to take stock from time to time and to see how things stand in jurisprudence. So, what is the relationship of doctrine and theory with jurisprudence? Is private law theory apolitical while public law contains politics for the very many constitutional ends in the Global South? In India, legal theorist Chhatrapati Singh very originally asked if legal systems and normative systems were the same? Chhatrapati’s enquiry was however a species of the classical approach to the law that promotes the law’s purity. On the contrary, the postcolonial approaches account for the historical life as well as the political proclivities of the law. The private law theory often seen as impersonal and non-imperial comes under scrutiny in the postcolonial approaches. Duncan Kennedy and Roberto Unger notably problematized contract theory, while Upendra Baxi argued for mass tort as public law—contract and tort are both private law—to offer, if you will, a jurisprudence of the South. A southern jurisprudence essentially rejects an impersonal reading of the private law.