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

The Law Library
dence, Legal History and even Criminology were included in the
Bodleian law library, although they were placed to one side. This
is not to criticise the guide, which reflected prevailing attitudes. At
that time the study of law was largely equated with the study of
legal doctrine: Roman Law through classical institutional works,
and English Law through cases, statutes and, textbooks and more
specialised commentaries in the law reviews. Except for Jurisprudence,
almost everything else was secondary or marginal. It is
rumoured that one of the leading law libraries in the country
refused to stock books in series with names like "Law in Society"
and "Law in Context" on the ground that they were not really law
books.
Such attitudes seem almost unthinkable today. Legal literature
has diversified in many directions: a much wider range of subjects;
different approaches: and, especially significant in this context,
more varied literary forms: for students, "cases, materials and text"
have joined the traditional case-book; critical introductions and
contextual works compete with the black-letter textbook; there are
critical introductions, skills manuals and workbooks, interactive
and ordinary videos and computer programmes. There are also
many more monographs and symposia and, a headache for librarians,
many more works that cross disciplines: law and economics,
law and psychology, and other branches of socio-legal studies; the
sociology of the legal profession, constitutional theory, law and
administration, law and medicine, and law and literature are just
some examples
Clearly this proliferation is a function of expansion—more producers
fanning out into hitherto unoccupied territories. Such taxonomic
puzzles and problems of allocation suggest that at least
some progress has been made in the direction of crossing disciplinary
boundaries. 55 Most academic lawyers probably read more
widely as part of their work than their predecessors did. Sometimes
their writings are read by colleagues in other disciplines—but my
impression is that this is still exceptional. What has happened falls
far short of a revolution, and traditional exposition of doctrine in
textbooks and treatises is still the dominant literary mode.
Contemporary legal scholarship and some of its unresolved problems
and tensions are the subject of the next chapter. So I shall
postpone detailed consideration of the nature of legal exposition
and of some of the emergent forms of legal scholarship. However,
it is convenient to pause here and consider a few general points
about secondary legal literature as it is found in law libraries today
112