“Pravova derzhava”. Issue 36 (2025), pages 332–341.

DOI: 10.33663/0869-2491-2025-36-332-341

Stoiko Olena
The formation of political jurisprudence as an interdisciplinary field of political and legal studies

After the Second World War, there was a demand for a new concept of judicial research in the context of political science, which was called political jurisprudence.
The works of political scientists in this field in the 1950s and 1960s largely used the theoretical concepts of sociology with minor improvements. The main principles of political jurisprudence were as follows: judges are human beings, not mechanical robots; their personal and social perceptions of justice influence and to some extent dictate their decisions; law and courts should be understood and studied in a broader social context.
Most studies in the field of political jurisprudence (1960s-1970s) focused mainly on the internal dynamics of the judicial decision-making process, primarily at the appellate level, paying relatively less attention to the socio-political context in which the judicial process operates. In the 1980s, political jurisprudence used a fairly broad methodological framework, and its objects of study were no longer limited to the judiciary. In general, political jurisprudence widely uses historical, doctrinal, descriptive institutional and normative approaches, and researchers combine knowledge of philosophy, history, sociology and political science. This pluralism, combined with the broadening of the objects of study, has meant that a much wider range of legal issues can be addressed.
Today, political jurisprudence faces a dilemma of legitimacy. All holders of political power claim to represent the will of the people. However, such claims are not always authentic and are not always linked to the collective desire for the common good. In other words, political jurisprudence should provide clear criteria of authenticity that will allow us to determine whether political power holders who appeal to the notion of popular sovereignty, claiming to be authoritative in their decisions, have the right to do so legally.
In Ukraine, a significant part of the theoretical and methodological foundations of political jurisprudence was borrowed by legal political science. It covers a fairly wide range of issues of state and legal development with an emphasis on the study of the political component of law, the study of the socio-political conditions for its implementation, the impact of political phenomena and processes on its functioning.
The Department of Legal Problems of Political Science, established at the V. M.Koretsky Institute of State and Law in 2002, was one of the first to engage in this area of research.

Key words: political jurisprudence, legal political science, law, constitution, court, legitimacy, public law.

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