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

The Law Library
everyone is affected by legislation, directly and indirectly, every
day. Most people have to read, interpret, apply, follow, avoid,
evade, and manipulate formal legal rules—such as those governing
V.A.T., social security benefits and road traffic. 17 Many people are
also involved in rule-making—for example, in discussing and formulating
rules of discipline or the constitution of a club or office
procedures. The techniques of handling rules in fixed verbal form
are much the same whether or not they are part of the law emanating
from the state. Acts of Parliament and, increasingly, European
Union legislation, international conventions on human rights, and
international regulation of economic matters are the most important
in respect of both status and scope, but they are only the tip
of the iceberg. Our destinies and our lives are to a large extent
regulated by rules in fixed verbal form. Being able to find, understand
and cope with formal rules is an important part of being a
citizen or a subject. Rule-handling is a basic social skill. 18
A law library is the place in which one will find the most
advanced literature on the making, interpretation and use of legislation
in this broad sense. It is also the repository of rich collections
of examples of different kinds of legislative texts. The literature on
law-making processes is fairly evenly divided between politics and
law. The secondary and theoretical literature is not as developed
as one might expect or hope, given the importance of the subject,
but there is enough available to serve as an adequate vehicle for
studying it from different perspectives and at different levels of
sophistication. Whether or not one continues to be repelled or
whether, as some do, one finds that the subject improves on
acquaintance and can even be a source of delight, the fact remains
that basic rule-handling skills are part of the equipment needed to
understand and cope with living and working in modern society.
It is not only non-lawyers who have shied away from the subject.
Traditionally common lawyers have preferred judge-made law to
legislation. Blackstone complained about the messy intrusions of
the legislature into the common law 19 ; two of the best-known evangelists
for the Harvard case-method, Joseph Henry Beale and James
Barr Ames, resisted the introduction of courses on legislation into
the curriculum. 20 Such courses are still relatively underdeveloped.
Insofar as they cannot avoid dealing with statutes, many law
teachers still tend to introduce legislative material mainly through
the medium of cases interpreting them. This is not difficult, for the
great majority of modern reported cases involve interpretation of
legislative texts. In 1982, Professor Guido Calabresi of Yale argued,
97