Jurisprudence Meets Epistemology: Facilitating Legal Understanding and Meaningful Learning in Legal Education with Concept Maps

This article relates jurisprudential scholar Jack Balkin's examination of the role of the individual in understanding law to the role of the individual in academic learning. It should be acknowledged from the outset that jurisprudence is 'a particular method of study ... of the general notions of law'. It concerns questions of what law is, not of how or why it is taught. Yet, as this article demonstrates, the two are not entirely unrelated, for how we define what law is affects how we understand law and, by corollary, how we teach it. The scope of this article is thus grounded firmly in the theoretical rather than the practical application of a particular epistemological framework to understanding law. The ultimate intention, however, is that this demonstration of the theoretical links between Balkin's views on how law is understood and an epistemological theory on how legal knowledge might be acquired will offer sufficient justification for taking the next step of practical application in an undergraduate law curriculum.