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

Epilogue
processes and social context? The activity variously called exposition
or practical doctrinal scholarship or legal dogmatics remains
prominent, despite a series of attacks that have challenged its validity
as well as its pretensions. The role of the jurist as expositor is
assured, even within the common law tradition, but the claims of
the censor, the empirical researcher, the craftsman, the technologist,
the internal sceptic and the outside observer are also persistent.
The relationship between all of these roles and claims is
uneasy and rarely has a satisfactory integration been achieved, as
is illustrated by the relative failure to date to construct stable coherences
in attempts to broaden the study of law from within. 9
There are also grounds for fearing that if academic law should
be cut back, a power struggle would ensue in which some of the
most interesting activities and lines of enquiry that have secured a
niche would be marginalised or squeezed out almost entirely by
some narrowly vocational orthodoxy. Not only socio-legal studies,
critical theory, sociology of law, legal history, the study of foreign
legal systems, and criminology, but also emergent fields, large
areas of legal practice, and the whole range of legal subjects that
affect ordinary people without regularly involving lawyers are all
areas which could suffer by a contraction of the academic enterprise
or a narrowing of its vision.
A fourth characteristic of Blackstone's Tower is that it seems to
exclude outsiders. Although accommodated within the university,
the law school is still often regarded as an outpost, or a forbidding
fortress or an exclusive club. Law students are reported to be standoffish
and cliquey; law teachers, according to Becher, are "variously
represented as vociferous, untrustworthy, immoral, narrow,
arrogant and conservative, though kinder eyes see them as impressive
and intelligent." 10 Even if unfair, these are troubling images.
As we saw in the first chapter, law features on the front pages of
newspapers, yet it is almost invariably hidden at the back of book
shops and booksellers seem reluctant to place anything that looks
like a "law book" in other sections, under for example feminism
or history or politics, however relevant and readable it may be."
Yet books relating to law are to be found throughout the book shop
as long as they do not carry the dreaded label.
Nowhere is this exclusiveness more apparent than in university
law libraries: even where the law library is not physically separate,
it must seem esoteric and unwelcoming to most outsiders. And, as
we have seen, most readable books related to law—novels, plays,
accounts of famous trials, "journalistic" works however excel-
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