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

The Quest For a Core
somewhat different contexts and to try to tease out some of the
concerns that underlie their persistence. I have chosen to inspect
six contenders: conceptions of legal science; law as a branch of
rational ethics; the core subjects debate; ideas about law as craft
and technology; do-as-you-like pluralism; and the idea of rules as
a necessary focus of legal study. This chapter ends with a brief
consideration of a different, but related, question: what, if anything,
can the discipline of law offer that is unique or special to general
understandings?
REDUCTIONISM—A SCEPTICAL TOUR
(a) Purification—Legal Science
The word "science" is often used to claim academic status for
a subject: domestic science, police science, policy science, scientology,
for example. History in the nineteenth century and most
social sciences in the twentieth have been concerned, sometimes
obsessively, with establishing their "scientific" credentials. Law
has not been immune from such hang-ups. A central issue of legal
theory in civil law systems centres on the epistemic basis of "legal
science"; the term is less common in the more relaxed Anglo-
Saxon tradition. 3 However, especially between 1870 and the mid-
1950s, American academic lawyers under German influence were
susceptible to analogies with the physical sciences: "If law be not
a science, a university will best consult its own dignity in declining
to teach it", intoned Christopher Columbus Langdell in 1887, and
proceeded to suggest that the lawyer, like the botanist, must select,
classify and arrange his specimens—in this instance reported
cases. 4 Analogies were invoked promiscuously with botany, chemistry,
physics, geometry, and biological evolution. Experimental
Jurisprudence, the states as legislative laboratories and, above all,
the idea of law as social engineering litter the literature. 5 Enthusiastic
decision-theorists, Bayesians and socio-biologists continue the
tradition.
We can readily dismiss many of the analogies as spurious and
the underlying assumptions about science as naive, but we should
not underestimate the persistence of the aspiration to try to emulate
the physical sciences in respect of such values as order, system,
cumulation, rigour, replicability and objectivity. There are concerns
about both validity and professional respectability. Even the
softest discipline needs to claim to be disciplined. 6
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