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

Legal Scholarship and the Roles of the Jurist
of law challenged the dominance of the Expository Tradition but,
except for a few Marxian critics, did not fundamentally deny its
validity or legitimacy. The central precept of those who favoured
realism or contextual approaches or socio-legal studies was that
for most purposes the study of rules alone is not enough. 76
However, Marxian scholars and the critical legal studies movement,
which came into prominence after 1977, offered a much
more radical critique, at least to start with. 77 According to one
recent interpretation of a complex story, critical legal studies went
through three phases 78 : a global critique of law from the outside,
as exemplified by Marxist attacks on all bourgeois legality and
strongly sceptical attacks on the claims to rationality or coherence
of the whole Western legal tradition. Then American critical legal
scholars, using deconstructive techniques borrowed from postmodernist
literary theory, attacked the form of particular fields of
law from within the academy, for instance, by showing the internal
contradictions and incoherence of received doctrine in traditional
fields such as contracts. Later, especially after the collapse of
socialism, there appeared to be a drawing back, partly in response
to accusations of nihilism, partly out of an awareness that critical
scholars who were themselves law teachers might "be caught in
the potentially inauthentic position of both propounding and
denouncing the law." 79 By the early 1990s critical legal studies in
the United States and other common law countries had diversified
and, in the eyes of some, had outlived its time.
Secondly, on the positive side, the past 20 years have seen a
period of expansion, intellectual ferment and diversification far
beyond what one might have expected in 1974. On the whole the
main trends in the common law world have been set in the United
States, but United Kingdom-based scholars have played a significant
part in fields such as legal philosophy, criminology and regulation.
In America the foreground has been dominated by two major
movements—economic analysis of law and critical legal studies—
which are normally represented as the right and left wings of a
politicised jurisprudence, with an outstandingly able group of political
and legal philosophers, such as Rawls, Dworkin, Raz, MacCormick
and Sen, defending the liberal democratic centre from these
challenges from the right and the left. But the diversification of
academic law went much further than that. What is important in
the present context is that critical legal studies and economic analysis
were only two parts of a much more complex picture.
Developments in legal theory can at least be treated as reflecting
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