I recently had the privilege of participating in a panel discussion at the Jurisprudence Section’s meeting at AALS 2024. The topic was jurisprudence and legal doctrine: what, if anything, is the relationship between general jurisprudence and legal doctrine? I’ve long shared Kevin Toh’s sense that the answer is more complicated than often assumed: that it depends on a range of underlying metaphysical and epistemic assumptions. The panel discussion was really interesting and edifying, I am excited to finalize a draft of a paper on this topic (hopefully) soon. In preparation for the panel, I made a little mindmap of the various moving parts that, I think, determine how we conceive of the relationship between jurisprudence and doctrine. I’m sharing that here. (As an side, Torben Spaak has a very interesting new piece on SSRN on just this sort of question).