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

APPENDIX
English Law Teachers as Academics:
A Preliminary Analysis 1
This note raises the question; are there any salient characteristics
that differentiate English law teachers from the academic profession
as a whole?
Let us start with a negative image. I have anecdotal evidence
that some law teachers sense an underlying hostility from fellow
academics and administrators, especially in the context of university
politics. This may not be sufficiently marked to generate the
analogue of lawyer jokes, but it is felt as an undercurrent. Becher
reported that colleagues' perceptions of academic lawyers and
their own self-image were generally unattractive and in some
respects peculiar. He constructs a picture of members of a soft,
applied, largely rural discipline that is isolated and fits uneasily in
the academy. For example:
"The predominant notion of academic lawyers is that they are not really
academic—one critical respondent described them as 'arcane, distant,
and alien: an appendage to the university world.' Their personal qualities
are dubious: they are variously represented as vociferous, untrustworthy,
immoral, narrow, arrogant and conservative, though kinder eyes
see them as impressive and intelligent. Their scholarly activities are
thought to be unexciting and uncreative, comprising a series of intellectual
puzzles scattered among 'large areas of description'.
This generally negative view seems to be shared by its victims, a
number of whom diagnosed a common 'tendency towards selfdenigration'
and 'a sense of doubt about one's intellectual quality'." 2
Becher's sample was admittedly very small and relates to 1980.
However, there is a good deal of anecdotal evidence to support at
least parts of this image. A much-quoted article entitled "The law
teacher: a man divided against himself" 3 is representative of an
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