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

The Law Library
"The answer, from the Editor of The Law Quarterly Review, accepted
in general by those present, was that a journal should not only be a
medium of reportage but had a wider duty to legal scholarship and to
the development of the law itself. It should provide a body of comment,
analysis and criticism of the law, pointing out flaws, anomalies and
longstanding misapprehensions. This criticism should embrace not only
statutes and decisions but also books and even other journals." 54
It would be tempting to analyse the assumptions about legal scholarship
and writing underlying this view, and to speculate whether
this would reflect a consensus today. The Law Quarterly Review
is one of the few academic journals that is regularly read by judges
and other senior members of the legal establishment. It seeks to
influence legal opinion as well as to be a vehicle for high quality
scholarly writing, mainly of a fairly traditional kind. Volume 109
for 1993 conforms fairly closely to the model of comment, analysis
and criticism of law, suggested by the former editor. There were 19
articles, about 14 of which could be said to be scholarly analyses of
contemporary legal doctrine. Two articles were by senior judges.
There were over 60 notes, almost all of which were analytical,
reflective, sometimes critical comments on recent reported cases.
The Law Quarterly Review and other similar journals also comment
fairly regularly on recent legislation and on important public
reports, especially those relating to law reform. This volume also
included reviews of 26 books. Most of the reviewers and authors
were legal academics.
While the Law Quarterly has been influential on the form and
style of other leading academic law journals, each has its own editorial
policy and distinguishing characteristics. Few so consistently
seek to bridge the academic/professional divide. Some are more
commitedly theoretical, some are more polemical, and a few are
consciously outlets for sociolegal or "critical" or other nontraditional
perspectives. By and large, despite the economic climate,
they have kept pace with the increase in the number of producers
and the diversification of legal scholarship. In law, it is not
too difficult to get published; it may not be so easy to get read.
OTHER LEGAL LITERATURE:
INCLUSIONS AND OMISSIONS
It is revealing that the Bodleian Law Library guide of 20 years
ago only included textbooks and periodicals as the main categories
of secondary literature of the United Kingdom. In 1974, Jurispru-
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