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

Epilogue
two reference groups who had different sets of expectations: the
legal profession and the university community. It is only since the
1970s that law schools have achieved both critical mass and sufficient
acceptance within the academy to start to build the capacity
and the self-confidence to set a more ambitious agenda both functionally
and intellectually. This enormous and belated expansion
has happened at a time when universities, the legal profession and
the legal system have all been changing rapidly in a relatively unfavourable
economic climate. It is uncertain whether in the next
phase law schools will consolidate, or expand further or retreat
back into being very modest institutions with a quite limited role.
The third characteristic of the modern law school is that by and
large it has been assimilated into the university. As such its commitment
is and should be to the academic ethic, that is to the advancement,
stimulation and dissemination of learning, broadly conceived—what
I have called know-why, know-what and
know-how. 8 Academic lawyers conform quite closely to the profile
of academics in general; their duties are defined in terms of teaching,
research and educational administration, and their career
development is determined by standard academic norms. Like
many other disciplines, law has been endemically introspective,
with recurring debates about objectives, priorities, and methods
and about the nature of the enterprise. Expansion has created the
conditions for diversification of several kinds: subject-matters, clienteles,
methods and perspectives.
In respect of ideas there is a relatively new, and to my mind
healthy, pluralism; to say that this is a house of many mansions, like
most cliches is at best a half-truth, which glosses over the persistent
concern to try to find a core to the discipline, or at least to make
it more homogeneous. It is naturally tempting to try to subsume
the discipline under some single conception of law as a system
of posited rules or universal moral principles or problem-solving
techniques or to make it a sub-branch of sociology or politics or
ethics or theology. Such forms of reductionism appeal to some, but
are unlikely to win a consensus in our post-modern world.
Those who, like myself, welcome a degree of diversity are resistant
to attempts to re-impose an old orthodoxy or create a new one.
Yet there are genuine and persistent concerns about identity both
on the part of individual law teachers and about the discipline as
a whole—if we cannot claim a core, is there a sufficient sense of
community based on at least a family of concerns about disputes,
order, problems, rules, values, concepts, facts, power, decisions,
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