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Law School Culture: A Visit to Rutland
tivity" measured in terms both of publication rates and sophistication
of research has steadily increased over the past 20 years. And,
as we shall see, conceptions of legal scholarship have recently
diversified. 38
More fundamentally there has been a gradual redefinition of the
identity of the academic lawyer, as part of a process of closer integration
of the law school into the university. 39 Until the 1960s law
teachers at Rutland were expected to be able to teach any of seven
or eight subjects and, indeed, took a pride in being generalists.
Today, almost all of the faculty, especially those under forty, consider
themselves to be specialists and rarely teach more than two
subjects. As in other disciplines, this has created a different kind
of tension between loyalty to the institution and commitment to
one's specialism. 40 Law schools like Rutland are generally too small
to be able to afford groups of specialists and this tension is mitigated
for some and exacerbated for others by the fact that the institution
is located near the middle of a quite compact country. Increasingly,
one's peers and collaborators are, or are thought to be, in
other law schools. Locally based cross-disciplinary work is still
quite exceptional, although that too may be changing.
At one level the Rutland faculty is committed to the academic
ethic. They conceive of their role as the advancement of learning
through teaching and research and most of them consider academic
administration to be a chore. However, this bland statement
conceals continuing conflicts and ambiguities. Individuals are
given space to develop as scholars in diverse ways, because
research is considered to be an individual matter. But in respect of
education the familiar conflicts persist. Although undergraduate
law student culture is still almost unequivocally oriented towards
the legal profession, the faculty is deeply ambivalent. There are, of
course, many opinions and strong vested interests. But the ambivalences
run deeper. Even the most professionally-oriented teachers
subscribe to the academic ethic, with varying degrees of commitment
and understanding; some former practitioners made financial
sacrifices in order to work in a university; but nearly all those who
define themselves as intellectuals or theorists or scholars value the
connection with legal practice. Some may be critical of the legal
profession, but Rutland has no true legal masochists, either those
who hate law or its study or who feel that they have a mission to
deter their students from serving Mammon. 41 If there is one thing
that unites the Rutland Faculty it is the professed belief that there
is no necessary incompatibility between viewing academic law as
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