They are Natural, Positive, Marxist, and Realist Law theories. You may deal other theories in detail in your course on jurisprudence. Natural law theory is the earliest of all theories. It was developed in Greece by philosophers like Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Conflict theory, first purported by Karl Marx, is a theory that society is in a state of perpetual conflict because of competition for limited resources. Conflict theory holds that social order is maintained by domination and power, rather than by consensus and conformity.

Marxist materialist theories relegate law to the ideological social superstructure and present law as an epiphenomenal and derivative tool harnessed for unequal, oppressive and ideological purposes.

Bentham is known as Father of Jurisprudence was the first one to analyze what is law. He divided his study into two parts: Examination of Law ‘as it is’ i.e. Expositorial Approach– Command of Sovereign.

There are two “natural law” theories about two different things: i) a natural law theory of morality, or what’s right and wrong, and ii) a natural law theory of positive law, or what’s legal and illegal. The two theories are independent of each other: it’s perfectly consistent to accept one but reject the other.

Approached historically, ideas relating to “majority rule” seem to fall into at least three fairly separate theories, here la- beled: (1) the group device theory; (2) the dogma of majority rule; and (3) the device of constitutional government theory.

There are four major theories of how government originates: evolutionary, force, divine right, and social contract.

Terms in this set (4)

• Force Theory. the state was born of force.
• Evolutionary Theory. The state developed naturally out of the early family.
• Divine Right Theory. God had created the state and that God had created had given those of royal birth a “divine right” to rule.

Force theory is the process of establishing a new government or country through the use of force. This process involves one group of people entering into an area and making everyone else within that territory submit to the new government and social system.

Organic theory is the idea that countries behave like organisms in that they seek nutrition to survive. The nutrition in the country’s case is land territory. It was used by Adolf Hitler to justify his ruthless expansion of Nazi Germany.

Much of the social contract philosophical tradition proposed a voluntary theory for state formation. One of the most prominent theories of early and primary state formation is the hydraulic hypothesis, which contends that the state was a result of the need to build and maintain large-scale irrigation projects.

Hal Draper in his Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution defines in the following words: “The state is the institution or complex of institutions which bases itself on the availability of forcible coercion by special agencies of society in order to maintain the dominance of a ruling class, preserve the existing property …

The generally accepted theory of the origin of the state is that various factors like religion, family, force and political consciousness were behind the growth of the state. The seventh line of argument is that the divine theory is undemocratic.

Charles Baron de Montesquieu (1689- 1755) was a Philosopher and he is often called the ancestor of sociology. He built on the work of Aristotle and added three types of social organizations with differences in cultural bias to the different types of governments.

According to many theories that have gained wide acceptance among anthropologists, culture exhibits the way that humans interpret their biology and their environment. For example, chimpanzees have big brains, but human brains are bigger.

Cultural Studies traces the relationships among aesthetic, anthropological, and political economic aspects of cultural production and reproduction. Cultural studies scholars and practitioners often begin their inquiries by questioning the common understandings, beliefs, and histories that shape our world.