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

The Quest For a Core
texts of their creation, articulation, operation and so on; any
account of such rule-handling activities has to include extraneous
factors (which may include other rules, but is not confined to
them). What other factors are relevant or significant, what is
"enough", or what appropriately counts as context typically
depends on the specific purpose and context of a particular study
or other activity. The maxim "the study of rules alone is not
enough", itself a rule-of-thumb, far from denying the importance
of rules, assumes that they are in some sense central. 77
Secondly, there are many varieties of "rule-scepticism". The
term is sometimes applied to those who emphasise the elusiveness
or ambiguity of rules or the many other conditions of doubt that
give rise to difficulties in their interpretation and application. Legal
pluralism, which emphasises the co-existence of different "rulesystems",
is sceptical of "monist" theories which try to integrate
all legal (or other) rules within a single, internally consistent,
system. These are examples of scepticism about certain claims
about law, but they involve no necessary commitment to strong
scepticism, such as the idea that all talk of rules is illusory or meaningless.
78 Most alleged "rule-sceptics" in jurisprudence, including
most realists and critical legal scholars, have tended to distance
themselves from strong versions of scepticism or nihilism. 79 However,
even the possibility of strong rule-scepticism can be accommodated
within the idea of law as a normative discipline, just as
moral scepticism or strong relativism can be treated as part of
ethics—a challenge to basic assumptions about the enterprise as a
whole. 80
To say that rules, in a broad sense, are a central focus of any
meaningful study of law may be correct, but on its own it is not
much more informative than the claim that problem-solving is central
to legal practice. Law is by no means unique in having rules
as a central focus; ethics, logic and linguistics could make similar,
though not identical, claims.
Furthermore, one fruitful way of looking at rules or norms is as
responses to problems. 81 From this perspective, rules are prescriptions
and in law, as in medicine, it is generally sensible for diagnosis
to precede prescription. 82 Rules may be necessary and central
to the study of law, but in many contexts they are not a good
starting-point for analysis. Moreover, what constitutes a "problem"
is relative to standpoint, depending on the vantage-point, role,
values and purposes of the person(s) for whom something is problematic,
whether they be participant or observer or in-between. On
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