Comparative terminology

Cross posted on Political Arguments.

Lawrence Solum explains the difference between the different terms used to describe the abstract study of what the law is: jurisprudence, legal theory or philosophy of law? One sentence caught my eye.

Moreover, in other legal cultures, for example, in Europe and Latin America, my sense is that the move to identify jurisprudence with philosophy of law never really took root.

Ther reason is quite simple. In many of these countries (certainly the French- and Spanish-speaking ones, but perhaps also others) the term "jurisprudence" refers to "case law," to the body of decisions made by the courts, usually the highest courts in each area of the law.

The distance between case law and legal philosophy, moreover, is all the greater because the official position in these countries—all of which follow the Civil Law tradition—is that judicial decisions are not a source of positive law, but only an interpretation of a statute in the particular circumstances of a given case. Legal practicioners (and professors, to an increasing degree) ignore this rule and study case law as much as their Common Law counterparts, but they are less likely to consult the work of judges when thinking about Law in the abstract.