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

Legal Scholarship and the Roles of the Jurist
to be relied on by students nor were they confined to the law of
a single jurisdiction. 51
Within a relatively short time the role of jurist as expositor
hardened into an orthodoxy which dominated English academic
law into the 1970s and beyond. In Sugarman's words: "[EJxposition,
conceptualization, systematization and the analysis of existing
legal doctrine became equated with the dominant tasks of legal
education and scholarship." 52
As polemical myth-making this story has been useful, but as history
it is over-simple and somewhat Whiggish. A more balanced
account of the period 1870 to 1970 would need to pay due regard
to several countervailing themes: first, neither English nor American
academic law has been completely dominated by a single monolithic
orthodoxy as the story suggests. At every stage in its history
law as a discipline has been the subject of tensions and controversy.
None of the small band of pioneers who are credited with
at least establishing a foothold for law in the universities were
narrow-minded hacks: it would be a travesty of history to suggest
that Pollock, Stephen, Anson, Dicey, Bryce, Salmond and Holland
were merely or even mainly writers of textbooks. Maitland, who
could hardly be accused of being a narrow expositor, clearly saw
that the production of sound introductory texts was a necessary
first step towards getting the study of English Law established. This
account of the "expository orthodoxy" does not readily accommodate
Jurisprudence, Legal History, Roman Law, Comparative
Law and Public International Law all of which featured in curricula
and legal literature. Nor does it fit scholars such as Maine, Maitland,
Holdsworth, Vinogradoff, and later Friedmann, Montrose,
Kahn-Freund and Lawson, to say nothing of the strong English tradition
of Public International Lawyers and Romanists. Exposition is
local and particular, as Bentham pointed out; our tradition of academic
law has been consistently quite cosmopolitan and not as
uniformly positivistic as the legend suggests.
Leading English expositors have rarely been content with merely
providing structured information for students. Some of the pioneers
of the textbook tradition, such as Fitzjames Stephen, Chalmers and
Pollock saw their works as a prelude to codification. 53 Others intended
their books to be useful as works of reference and sources of
arguments for practitioners. Scholars involved in the higher exposition
have regularly tried to rationalise and systematise particular
branches of the common law on the basis of principle. Since 1945
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