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

Law School Culture: A Visit to Rutland
professional school, involved at all levels of professional formation
and development, nor to diversifying its activities along the lines
of the I.L.C. model. 63 Almost all non-degree teaching and other
outside activities are done on an individual rather than an institutional
basis. At undergraduate level, so long as the faculty is too
ambivalent and divided to provide a clear lead and messages from
the profession are ambiguous, it seems that a narrow and probably
deluded set of vocational attitudes is likely to continue to dominate
student culture and to condemn the institution to be and to be
treated as little more than a mediocre nursery school for the
profession.
Notes
Cited by Milton Mayer, in Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir (1993) at pp.
97-98.
Becher, Academic Tribes and Territories, op. cit.
ibid at p. 79.
Becher suggests that an academic culture should be interpreted in terms of the
nature of knowledge and the workings of the academic community and their
interaction (Chap. 1). I am following his lead and I shall later be considering in
turn the law library, the nature of contemporary legal scholarship, whether the
discipline of law has a stable core, and what, if anything, it has to offer in the
way of understanding law itself and more general understandings. Other, rather
different, "ethnographic" studies of academic life include F. Bailey, Morality and
Expediency: The Folklore of Academic Politics (1977); Colin Evans, Language
People: the experience of teaching and learning modem languages in British universities
(1988).
Rutland is a composite. As in other works of fiction any resemblance that it bears
to any particular institutions is incidental.
Between 1986 and 1993 the staff-student ratio officially declined from 1:12 to
1:18, but this was partly mitigated by the increased amount of teaching provided
by part-timers, about half of whom were practising solicitors. "Student load"
refers to "full-time equivalents" rather than "warm bodies", of which, at a guess,
there are over 1000, including part-time and modular students.
Below, Chap. 5.
KLRM pp. 63-65 (Underhill Moore's parking studies).
Arthur Sutherland, The Law at Harvard, (1967) at p. 243. The elite American law
school is generally considered to be a total institution, more demanding, terrifying,
and competitive than its younger English cousin, cf. the hostile reaction of
a student to Langdell Hall in Scott Turow, One L (1977) at p. 36. The exterior
of the Senate House of the University of London is decorated with images of
famous sages and scholars; there is a rumour (unconfirmed) that the Faculty of
Law of one Latin American university has a mural depicting Justice with loaded
scales and one eye peeping out of her blindfold. The exterior of my own law
school at University College, much smaller than these, but still quite grand, has
some unobtrusive reliefs depicting artisans and workers, hinting that, contrary
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