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

The Quest For a Core
riers" between disciplines and inhibit the growth of interdisciplinary
co-operation and new intellectual configurations; in
law, post-modernists, it has been noted, are naturally attracted by
legal pluralism 62 ; it might even be suggested that the common law,
with its emphasis on the pragmatic and particularities, is at its best
when "muddling through", which may be pluralism under another
name. 63
In earlier chapters I have tried to describe the new pluralism in
academic law and I have not concealed my general liking for it.
Pluralism is even becoming respectable. For example, the Lord
Chancellor's Advisory Committee in its 1994 consultative paper on
the initial or academic stage of legal education explicitly made
diversity a key-stone of its approach and has suggested the abandonment
of a knowledge-based core for law degrees. 64 However,
significantly, it has tried to set some limits to unfettered pluralism
and talks in terms of substituting a "prescribed common element"
for the core rather than totally abandoning it. 65
The temper of the times may be strongly anti-reductionist, but
this in turn breeds a reaction. There is, for example, a common
vocabulary for attacking do-as-you-like pluralism: terms like eclecticism,
dilettantism, even nihilism are frequently invoked by commentators
on the intellectual scene. Gunther Teubner, himself a
leading exponent of a form of systems theory, neatly sums up one
important aspect of the situation:
"Since modern society is characterized on the one side by a fragmentation
into different epistemes, on the other side by their mutual interference,
legal discourse is caught in an 'epistemic trap.' The simultaneous
dependence on and independence from other social discourses is the
reason why modern law is permanently oscillating between positions of
cognitive autonomy and heteronomy." 66
For most of my career I have been committed to developing
broader and more varied approaches to the study of law both as
a theorist and activist. The labels and slogans attached to this
endeavour—such as "realism", "law-in-context", "socio-legal
studies", "broadening the study of law from within"—are not particularly
significant; indeed, they have sometimes been a handicap
because they have invited attempts to define them in theoretical
ways which are generally misconceived. I do not believe that the
ideas associated with realism and related terms are on their own
sufficiently precise or specific to ground a distinctive theoretical or
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