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

The Quest For a Core
Within the legal community a distinction is sometimes drawn
between "lawyerlike" (positive) and "legalistic" (negative) qualities.
90 This can be interpreted as an attempt to isolate the more
admired aspects of "the legal mind". One can identify the qualities
which are commonly valued in this context from the ever-growing
lists of intellectual skills that are produced in connection with
modern skills training. The intellectual qualities that are expected
of "the good lawyer" in this context include ability to express oneself
clearly both orally and in writing; ability to distinguish the relevant
from the irrelevant; ability to construct and present a valid,
cogent and appropriate argument 91 ; ability to identify issues and to
ask questions in a sequence appropriate to the particular context;
general problem-solving skills; library research skills; and, increasingly
within legal education, ability to spot ethical dilemmas and
issues. 92
A striking feature of standard lists of such intellectual skills is that
almost none of them is unique to law: skills of analysis, synthesis,
reasoning, communication and problem-solving are aspects of
clear thinking which are valued in most disciplines and which are
sometimes claimed as transferable. They are, of course, combined
in different ways with different priorities in different contexts. The
'case for law' as a good basis for general education rests in large
part on the claim that the subject-matter of the discipline is potentially
an excellent vehicle for developing such general intellectual
skills 93 ; conversely, in the English context, the justification for
allowing non-law graduates to follow an accelerated route to qualifying
as practitioners is grounded on the premise that the basic
intellectual skills required of lawyers can be developed as well by
other disciplines and all that they need extra is a bit of legal knowledge,
some specific techniques, and socialisation into the milieu
of one or other kind of legal practice. On this view, the phenomenon
of some law firms preferring nonlaw graduates can be interpreted
as an implicit criticism of the practice of much undergraduate
legal education.
Within legal education these intellectual skills are supposed to
be acquired through the study of a body of primary materials
which, as we have seen, cover most areas of social life, are welldocumented
and accessible. 94 We have also seen that in practice
only a small part of these materials are regularly exploited for educational
and scholarly purposes within law schools. 95 Trial records,
legal instruments and many other legal records are neglected by
academic lawyers as well as scholars in other disciplines. On this
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