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

6. Legal Scholarship and the Roles of the
Jurist
"The predominant notion of academic lawyers is that they are not really
academic . .. Their scholarly activities are thought to be unexciting and
uncreative, comprising a series of intellectual puzzles scattered among
'large areas of description.''"
This summary of Becher's findings reinforces a quite common view
that legal scholarship does little or nothing to advance knowledge.
Lewis Eliot in C. P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers, although he was
surrounded by dedicated researchers, was treated like a resident
man-of-affairs, rather than as an academic: he was not expected
to do research or to publish. 2 One unnamed Harvard Professor, a
non-lawyer, is reported to have said that there is no Nobel Prize
for law because common lawyers have no respect for original
thought. 3 Professor Brian Simpson, himself a noted scholar, suggests
that there have been no great legal discoveries in the past
hundred years. 4 Becher reports one respondent as saying that academic
law is concerned "mainly with ordering a corpus of knowledge:
it is a largely descriptive pursuit". 5
In this chapter I shall argue that this negative view is misleading
in at least three respects: it is out-of-date; it oversimplifies by focusing
solely on expository work; and it fundamentally misconceives
the nature of legal exposition. First, legal scholarship is now a
large-scale, burgeoning enterprise. If Lewis Eliot was ever a recognisable
representative of an earlier generation of academic lawyers,
we said good-bye to him a long time ago. Secondly, the idea of
legal scholarship as essentially descriptive and authority-based
refers to only one kind of activity: exposition, which has declined
in prominence and prestige in recent years. Today, academic law
is pluralistic, involving a bewildering diversity of subject-matters,
perspectives, objectives and methods. Thirdly, even the lowest
forms of exposition involve interpretation, selection and arrangement
of quite elusive data. It can no more be interpreted as "merely
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