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

Legal Scholarship and the Roles of the Jurist
values it embodied, evolutionary development and legislative
restraint. It was not so much a legitimation of the status quo, as
many have suggested, as a plea to restore, preserve and strengthen
an ancient tradition which was under threat and which had already
been damaged, first by the Normans, and more recently by ad hoc
legislation. The enduring significance of Blackstone's "exposition"
is illustrated by the fact that it was chosen as the first target of
attack for "trashing" by one of the pioneers of American critical
legal studies. 33
American treatises
One can interpret the greatest works of American expository
scholarship in similar fashion. The first generation of treatise writers
saw as one of their primary tasks the production of a body of literature
which could be a vehicle both for the education of intending
lawyers from all over the country and for the unification, simplification,
and rationalisation of the received common law and its
adaptation to the circumstances of the New World. 34 Harvard was
a national, not just a local law school. Under Langdell's system
students mastered the fundamental principles and methods of the
common law. The great generation of treatise writers of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century—Beale, Gray, Wigmore,
Williston, and Corbin—wrote about American Law, largely in private
law fields that fell within the jurisdiction of the several states. 35
The case method freed the expositors from the constraints of the
student market. In the eyes of many, one of the great achievements
of the Harvard Law School in its educational and scholarly work
was to detach the study of law from the particularities of any single
jurisdiction—thereby preserving the unity of the common law at
the national level and avoiding getting bogged down too much in
local detail. This was done by maintaining the fiction that there is
such an entity as American Law.
The Restatements of the American Law Institute
The dilemmas and ambiguities surrounding the nature and role
of exposition are very clearly illustrated by the most ambitious
expository project in the history of the common law, the Restatements
of the American Law Institute (A.L.I.). From its establishment
in 1923 the A.L.I, was an elite, national lawyers' organisation, a
prestigious alliance of leading judges, practitioners and academics.
Like the major treatises it supplemented, the project was a rather
belated response to a series of perceived problems that had sur-
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