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

The Law Library
needs of students and, to a lesser extent, of academic researchers.
But the curriculum is itself dependent on the availability of published
materials and library resources. Often in the history of legal
education publishers have waited on the courses, while the development
of courses has been hampered—although not completely
frustrated—by the absence of suitable books. Perhaps even more
surprising to the outsider is what one does not find in respect of
primary sources. We have already seen that there is a wealth of
published primary material in the form of law reports and statutes;
almost as striking is the absence of other kinds of primary documents.
It is not only legislatures and superior courts that produce
masses of written material. As the Commonwealth Legal Records
project has shown, these represent only a small and in many
respects unrepresentative sample of legal records. 60 For every
appellate judgment, there are dozens of trials; for every record of
a contested trial, there are many more documents relating to disputes
that were settled out of court by negotiation or by some other
form of dispute processing (many of these are, of course,
confidential); for every litigated contract, there are probably thousands
that were not disputed; and then there are routine wills, conveyances,
standard form contracts and dozens of other kinds of
legal instruments. These records of transactions and operations,
which are the stuff of daily practice, hardly feature in law libraries
at all: the records of a few famous trials, which are rarely systematically
collected; some collections of standard forms for contracts,
wills, and conveyances; and not much else. These potentially rich
materials for study by law students, by legal scholars and by
scholars from other disciplines are almost systematically neglected.
They are as strong evidence as any of the extraordinary bias of the
tradition of academic law towards the upper reaches of the system
and the preference for the exceptional and the pathological over
the routine and the mundane.
The holdings of secondary works in the Rutland Law Library
illustrate these patterns. The secondary literature (including
periodicals) represents about 20 per cent, of the collection. There
is a reasonably well-developed academic literature in the eight or
so standard undergraduate subjects and for some of the more popular
or long-established options, such as Family Law and Public
International Law. European Community Law is burgeoning, and
there is a small literature of exceptionally high quality on Restitution.
Commercial Law, Conveyancing, Valuation, Agricultural Law,
Planning, Landlord and Tenant are largely dominated by practi-
115