Blackstone's Tower: The English Law School - College of Social ...

Law School Culture: A Visit to Rutland
take it, the most common explanation given being that this was a
form of insurance in case non-intending practitioners decided to
qualify later. 29 However, in response to the current "crisis", which
some see as an opportunity, a group of lecturers has proposed that
three of the "core" subjects should be made optional, thereby signalling
that the Law School is serious about the LLB providing a
general education as well as greatly increasing student choice. The
issue is unresolved, but the indications are that about half of the
academic staff are opposed to any such change. 30
The Rutland Faculty
There is a large literature on the academic profession and on
students in higher education in Britain, much of it based on empirical
research. There is a remarkably extensive, neurotically introspective,
and mainly speculative literature on law teachers and law
students in the United States. 31 With a few exceptions, mainly relating
to gender, race and access, there have been hardly any empirical
studies about English law students and law teachers as such,
except some irregular statistical surveys. 32 At least two studies of
academic lawyers in England are in progress. 33 There is, of course,
a mass of information—historical, anecdotal, biographical, statistical
and interpretative—scattered in the literature. However, as
with law schools as institutions, the scholarly literature about
higher education generally assumes that law teachers and law students
are not an especially distinctive part of the academic scene.
Becher is an exception. Law teachers are almost as inconspicuous
in the sociological literature on the legal profession. 34
In his surveys of British senior common rooms in 1964, 1976
and 1989 Professor Halsey treated law as one part of the social
sciences and humanities, and law teachers remain largely invisible
in his Decline of Donnish Dominion and its predecessors. 35 He has
very kindly extrapolated the sample of academic lawyers from his
1989 survey and made it possible to contrast them with a total
sample of 2,674 respondents. A preliminary analysis of this rich
set of data produces some interesting results, including a few surprises,
but by and large it confirms the hypothesis that in most of
Halsey's categories academic lawyers are near the middle of the
academic spectrum. 36
The faculty at Rutland is reasonably representative of the national
profile of academic lawyers and, in particular, of those in "old"
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