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

Legal Scholarship and the Roles of the Jurist
However, academic legal culture can be said to be participantoriented
in a stronger sense. Let me illustrate this with an anecdote.
I was once asked by a senior postgraduate student of philosophy
if he could sit in on some of my undergraduate seminars in legal
theory. By chance he turned up when we were studying utilitarianism—in
two weeks. In the second seminar, behaving as law
teachers do, I used a standard role-play technique: the group was
to pretend that it was an international committee established to
consider revisions of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Each student was asked to represent a Government that based its
position on a particular kind of moral theory, such as classical actutilitarianism,
indirect utilitarianism, one or other kinds of rights
theory, or moral relativism. We focused mainly on the question
whether utilitarians of any kind could justify supporting an absolute
prohibition on torture, inhuman and degrading treatment (Article
3). Each participant was required to vote on a number of motions
and amendments, sometimes as a representative of a particular
position, sometimes as a matter of individual conscience. No
abstentions were allowed. I was slightly apprehensive that the
philosopher would think the exercise simplistic and naive. Instead,
he told me afterwards that he had suffered mild culture-shock.
Although he had taken several courses on ethics, including a whole
semester on utilitarianism, he had never before been asked to make
a decision in class.
This incident illustrates the notion of law as a participantoriented
discipline. In classes, in examinations, in moots and other
exercises, law students are as a matter of course asked to adopt
and act out different participatory roles in specified contexts 22 —to
pretend that they are an appellate judge or advocate, a solicitor
advising a client on a point of law, a law-maker or law reform
pressure group, or a businessman or citizen contemplating the
implications and likely consequences of a course of action. The
purpose of this class was to help students understand the differences
between some standard moral theories and to clarify their
own views in relation to them. The use of simulations and roleplays
in legal education is not restricted to the development of
"skills". 23
R.G. Collingwood argued that a historian could not give an
adequate account of the Battle of Trafalgar or Caesar crossing the
Rubicon without understanding the situation and internal point of
view of key participants in the action. 24 More generally it is widely
accepted across disciplines that in order to interpret, describe and
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