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

Legal Scholarship and the Roles of the Jurist
corned the development of inter-disciplinary approaches, but
nevertheless concluded: "Disinterested legal-doctrinal analysis of
the traditional kind remains the indispensable core of legal thought,
and there is no surfeit of such analysis today." 61
It is particularly striking that a leading exponent of one kind of
interdisciplinary approach should re-affirm from the bench the
centrality of traditional expository work. Posner's statements need
to be seen in a wider context. Since the late 1970s American law
journals have been flooded with introspective articles about the
nature of legal scholarship, trends in legal thought and the health
of law schools. There have been several strands in these debates 62 ;
especially germane in the present context is the complaint, not
unprecedented in history, that academic law and legal practice
have grown further and further apart.
A particularly interesting example is an article by Judge Harry
Edwards published in 1992 in the Michigan Law Review entitled
"The growing disjunction between legal education and the legal
profession" 63 in which he made a strong plea for a return to "practical
doctrinal scholarship" as the core of the discipline. The article
stimulated eighteen responses in a symposium in the same
journal. 64
Edwards' thesis is that American law schools are moving in the
direction of pure theory, while law firms are moving in the direction
of pure commerce, leaving a vacuum in respect of both technical
competence and ethical responsibility. No doubt mindful of
the furore provoked by Dean Paul Carrington when he suggested
that critical legal scholars, like unwanted aliens, should emigrate
to other parts of the academy, 65 Edwards is careful to acknowledge
a role for "theory" and to accept that law schools should accommodate
and tolerate innovative approaches. But, he implies, these
should be treated as belonging at the periphery rather than the
core. He explicitly singled out multi-disciplinary work as one of
these peripheral activities and lambasted the dilettanteism of academic
lawyers who dabble in areas in which they have no formal
training. This is not a new complaint: when Law and Economics
becomes economics by lawyers it may just pass muster; when lawyers
indulge in literary theory one raises an eyebrow; when Law
and Psychiatry becomes psychiatry by lawyers one dives for
cover. 66 In expressing these concerns, Edwards resurrects the idea
of "practical doctrinal studies" as the core of the discipline of law
in both research and teaching.
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