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

Epilogue
attempts to account for it solely in terms of rational utility tend to
be absurd; and adopting a bird's eye, top-down, view is an exercise
of the mind: the intellect constructs and imposes a structure; the
imagination reminds one of history and the complexities of human
experience. Beyond this it is probably sensible to leave my audience
to create their own meanings. I have stuck with the title
because it links four main themes in this attempt to interpret the
world of the English law school from the inside.
First, Blackstone's Tower is a vantage point from which to look
at law, in all its variety and elusiveness, from a number of levels
and angles. If one looks outwards one can construct a panorama
and a map—which is both necessary and of limited use. 6 If one
looks inwards, one finds in the library an extraordinarily rich storehouse
of texts, stories and ideas; the law library has two striking
characteristics: first, the primary sources—legislation, law reports,
other original documents—greatly outnumber the secondary writings
and are constantly renewed by fresh problems, decisions, and
rationalisations from the world outside. More than in most disciplines
academic lawyers feed off these primary texts rather than each
other. However, secondly, what regularly reaches the library represents
only a small, and in many respects untypical, part of what
is going on outside. As we saw in the legal records project, the
variety and extent of legal documents are not reflected in library
holdings. The neglect of routine legal documents in legal education
is a symptom of a more general tendency. 7 At least until recently,
academic law had been quite restricted in both scope and depth—
most academic attention has been focused on parts of lawyers' law
and lawyers' action, which are themselves only part of the law and
law in action. It is widely accepted that in order to get to grips
with the particularities of law one has to go into the field or streets
or courts to observe or to participate or both. To adapt Holmes, to
understand the life of the law requires both logic and experience.
But the law school is quite comfortable, the library is an absorbing
treasure-house and many who venture out never return. In short,
at this stage in its evolution Blackstone's Tower has marked limitations
as a vantage-point.
The second salient characteristic of the modern English law
school is that, despite a long tradition, it is in most respects a recent
creation. Indeed, it is only just beginning to come of age. Historically
the main reason for this has been that the study of English law
was a relative late-comer to universities, and the pioneers had to
devote most of their energies to establishing their credentials with
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