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

The Quest For a Core
If I am asked what can the discipline of law contribute to general
understanding or our intellectual life, I am inclined to adopt a similar
posture to Carroll's. If asked why I would include a law-trained
person in some multi-disciplinary team that was setting out to study
a particular society or to sit on a committee on social science
research, I might well reply: "Why not?" And, at a more abstract
level, it may be wise not to stay for an answer for questions about
the meaning or purpose of the pursuit of truth.
Some quite mundane reasons could be given to justify such
seeming evasions: what combination of knowledge, skills and
experience is likely to be useful for an enquiry or project depends
in large part on the nature and purpose of the enterprise; there is
no single prototype of "the academic lawyer"; and, as Carroll's
Baker reminds us, individual character may be as important as
occupational skills in determining suitability for a task.
Earlier, I suggested that initial scepticism about the search for a
core or essence of the enterprise of studying law is justified at a
general level, but that there may sometimes be good reasons, intellectual
or pragmatic, for settling on a canon of basic subjects or
concepts or a list of fundamental skills or some other "core" for
specific, contingent purposes. If at a general level one finds a
common focus in rules or problem-solving or institutions, for
example, far from identifying what is unique about legal studies,
this illustrates the extent of the overlap and the continuities
between legal and other enquiries.
Such mild scepticism is not evasion, if one believes that academic
enquiry is both open-ended in respect of purposes and open
to many interpretations. The subject-matter of law is so wide and
so fluid, and the purposes of its study so varied that refusal to give
definitive or reductive general answers is fully justified. But it
would be unsatisfactory, having offered a guided tour of my home
ground, if I refused to venture any opinions at all about the value
of what is on offer.
One of the main themes has been that neither legal education
nor legal scholarship can afford to be self-contained. Throughout
I have emphasised the continuities between law as a subject of
study and other disciplines and between law as practice and other
practical activities. I have suggested that law as a subject is not as
impenetrable nor as mystifying as it has sometimes appeared, but
rather it is an important part of everyday social life. It might be
objected that I have said a good deal about the history, needs and
internal problems of law schools, but I have not directly addressed
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