The Department of Jurisprudence seeks to contribute to the advancement of South African jurisprudence, legal theory, and legal practice through teaching and research. Our core discipline, jurisprudence, includes theory, history, philosophy, ethics, and skills. It encourages us to look beyond institutional structures, sources, and policy in search of something more. The Department of Jurisprudence's modules primarily address the sources, classifications, key ideas, and concepts, as well as the historical and philosophical backdrop of law, particularly South African law.

Our principal academic objective is to improve law students' undergraduate research skills by implementing a mostly research-based assessment approach. The department also seeks to instill essential principles (particularly a commitment to humanity, concern for the natural and social worlds, fairness, peace, and equity in human affairs) in the teaching and practice of the law.

The department focuses on critical, contextual, imaginative, multidisciplinary, and transformative legal theory and education at all levels of study. Jurisprudence, as a subject of knowledge, is primarily concerned with the concept of law.

The Department of Jurisprudence has made significant progress in shifting the discourse of law, legal theory, and jurisprudence away from the abstract conceptual study of law that is prevalent in the Western tradition and toward one that is firmly grounded in time and space (i.e., context), specifically engaging the question of jurisprudence in the context of a transforming society and an ethically and politically complex world. Jurisprudence revolves around the concepts of democracy, worldliness, the social tie (community), and justice (social, historical, and epistemic justice).