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

The Law Library
also contain secondary stories—of the particular proceedings or of
the development of prior solutions or, occasionally, the life-stories
of one or more participants. 31 Imagine that every week, in this
country alone, dozens of such morality tales were added to the
collection, each one telling a new story which raised hitherto unresolved
questions or doubts—and that around the English-speaking
world the same process is going on, so that in any one year thousands
of fresh items are added to the collection. Imagine, then, that
there is a whole industry of specialist editors and publishers who
select, package, index, cross-reference, produce and distribute
these anthologies systematically and regularly, and that there are
also secondary industries of critics, commentators, synthesisers and
summarisers making the collection accessible and convenient to
use for a variety of purposes. Nowhere in literature, folklore,
mythology, or even medicine or social work, does such a collection
exist. But it exists in law.
There are, at least, three other characteristics of the law reports
that deserve special emphasis: they are authentic; they are detailed;
they are interconnected.
(a) Authenticity. The law reports are authentic in the sense that the
facts arose out of actual disputes rather than out of the imagination
of an individual or a community: unlike myths, legends, fiction
or hypotheticals dreamed up by academics such as the prisoner's
dilemma, the Cretan liar paradox, or the rodeo problem 32 , they
come fairly directly from "the real world". One does not need to
adopt a correspondence theory of truth to see that this is highly
significant. One may readily agree that the stories in the law reports
have been constructed, processed, and packaged in ways that often
take them a long way from the original events and that "the facts"
are often homogenised or distorted or translated into lawyers' categories
that may make them almost unrecognisable to the original
participants. Some facts, as in the famous case of Donoghue v.
Stevenson, were merely allegations that were never proved by evidence.
33 Even if one concedes all of these points, which can easily
be overstated, the stories presented to the judges, the commentators,
and other readers came from outside. Also, very few cases
reach the law reports in which the facts were not backed by carefully
sifted evidence—which is not to say that "the facts" are
always true. Modern law reports are also authentic in another
sense: they are professionally edited by barristers and the texts of
the judgments contain the judges' own words. In that sense they
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