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

The Quest For a Core
new skills orthodoxy is beginning to build up a coherent picture
of many tasks undertaken by lawyers and what is involved in doing
them reasonably well. That is at least a start. In this area professional
training is ahead of undergraduate legal education in respect
of theory as well as practice. 72
(f) Something To Do With Rules?
The preceding sections illustrate both the persistence and the
contingency of attempts to find a single core or essence for law as
a discipline. To try to purify legal knowledge of all non-legal elements
or to treat the discipline of law as merely a sub-branch of
another field of study or to define a core in terms of a settled body
of knowledge, even if only settled by convention, or to locate the
core of professional practice in a common set of generic skills are
all too simple. One cannot reduce a whole discipline to a single
formula.
The sociology of knowledge teaches us that academic division
of labour is historically contingent. The academic ethic suggests
that it is contrary to the spirit of free enquiry to prescribe artificial
boundaries between disciplines. In jurisprudence it is now generally
accepted that attempts to delimit the field by seeking a general
definition of law are doomed to fail; the subject matter is too varied
and elusive. 73 So our picture of a discipline needs to be sufficiently
flexible and open-ended to encompass a diversity of subjectmatters,
perspectives and methods and to impose no artificial constraints
on potential lines on enquiry. On the other hand, the idea
of a discipline does suggests some limits to do-as-you-like pluralism.
One may acknowledge grey areas and paradigm shifts, but
there are some activities which clearly count as studying law and
some which do not.
In the context of an attempt to explore the current state and
future potential of the academic legal enterprise in England, it may
be enough to resort to robust common sense, without pursuing too
many theoretical hares. Just as it is difficult, though not impossible,
to imagine mathematics without numbers or psychology without
some concept of psyche or mind (however contested), so one may
ask: is it possible to conceive of the study of law without some
notion of rules or norms? In other words, is not a focus on rules a
necessary, if not a sufficient, condition for an activity to count as
studying law?
This is a jurisprudential minefield, but let me try to deal with it
in a relatively simple way. To start with a semantic point. Terms
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