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

The Law Library
far only on a modest scale: moral philosophers, probability theorists
and statisticians have found them to be a fruitful source of concrete
examples of puzzles or problems—often more realistic and
sometimes more complex than standard hypotheticals; students of
logic and rhetoric have occasionally subjected examples of legal
arguments to detailed analysis; political scientists, especially in the
United States, have made fairly extensive use of Supreme Court
Reports, especially on constitutional matters. A few non-lawyer historians,
psychologists, discourse analysts, and literary theorists have
used examples from the law reports, sometimes rather selectively
and not always with due regard to context. 51 But this is rather like
picking up a few diamonds on the surface of an extremely rich
lode. In order to start it is sensible to read two or three books on
using a law library and legal method, and then to dig in. 52
LEGAL PERIODICALS
Law journals and other periodicals occupy almost one fifth of
the shelf-space in the Rutland law library. However, we shall not
pause here very long; for, although segregated from the general
periodicals section of the main library, academic law journals share
many of the features of their counterparts in other disciplines: there
is an informal hierarchy of prestige; they are indexed in much the
same ways; they are the main outlet for specialist writing and, to
a lesser extent, for polemics and book reviews; they continue to
proliferate in ways that suggest that they are more producer-driven
than demand-led; and, perhaps for that reason, they command a
small audience. They are rarely the best starting-point for visitors
from other disciplines.
Legal periodicals are more varied than the law reports. In England
they include general journals of mainly academic interest,
such as The Cambridge Law Journal, The Modern Law Review, and
Legal Studies. There are several kinds of specialist periodicals,
some of which serve both practitioners and academics, or like The
Criminal Law Review, a wider professional audience; as in other
disciplines this is an expanding sector, involving high prices and
low print-runs. There are general practitioners' journals, such as
The Law Society's Gazette, The Solicitors' Journal, Counsel and
the more general weekly New Law Journal. There are proliferating
newsletters, information services and broadsheets. These categories
are replicated on a modest scale in the smaller jurisdictions of the
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