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

The Law Library
written by practitioners and judges. During the nineteenth and
early twentieth century many legal authors were part-time teachers,
with a foot in both camps. Since the Second World War the balance
has shifted: some of the leading practitioners' treatises have
been taken over by academic lawyers or by combined teams of
academics and practitioners. 57 In recent years there has been a
growing divide between practitioners' treatises and student works
and academics tend to monopolise the latter. Nevertheless, practitioners
and judges continue to make substantial contributions to
legal scholarship. That is one reason why the word "jurist" transcends
the academic-practical divide.
A third, related point, concerns the economics of publishing,
which had some important consequences for legal scholarship.
Until about 1960, commercial law publishing in England was dominated
by two specialist publishers, Butterworths and Sweet and
Maxwell. This had profound effects on the form, style and content
of law books and, above all, on what did and did not get published.
For example, those books that were published were professionally
edited, efficiently distributed, and usually had an assured market,
for a fair number of books were bought by both students and practitioners.
However, the leading law publishers had firm, rigid, and
very narrow ideas about what did and what did not constitute a
law book. Law books were essentially expository works, ranging
from practitioners' treatises down through student textbooks to
"nutshells" and other cram books for examinations that were largely
tests of memory. There were few outlets for legal scholars who
wished to write books that did not fit this rigid mould. Furthermore,
the specialist law publishers concentrated on the legal market,
which consisted mainly of three main categories: practitioners, students,
and law libraries. Publishers, booksellers, authors and purchasers
were caught in a self-renewing straitjacket.
From the late 1960s this situation began to change. It is not possible
here to enter into the complexities of the story. In 1977 a
report on academic law publishing listed over 20 publishers with
law lists; most of those had entered the field quite recently. 58 The
trend has continued. Butterworths and Sweet and Maxwell still
command a large share of the market, but they now face strong
competition, in both academic and practitioner markets, and they
have themselves broadened their range. 59
A fourth point about academic law libraries is what they do not
include. The content of a university library is closely related to
what is taught. Purchasing policies naturally give priority to the
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