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

Appendix
angst-ridden literature, not all of it American. The ambiguities
about the role of law schools are, not surprisingly, shared by law
teachers. In chapter six, I argued that the depiction of legal scholarship
as largely descriptive is not only out of date, but is also
fundamentally misconceived. I pass no comment on the personal
qualities, except to say that I find most of my chosen profession
rather congenial and I can think of very few who fit Becher's image,
almost none in respect of integrity. Whether my colleagues are
more obnoxious than other academics I have no means of
knowing.
Without dismissing this negative picture out of hand, let me at
least outline an alternative hypothesis; that English law teachers in
most important respects are not very different from the rest of the
academic profession in this country.
In his surveys of British senior common rooms in 1964, 1976
and 1989 Professor Halsey treated law as one part of the social
sciences and humanities and law teachers remain largely invisible
in his Decline of Donnish Dominion and its predecessors. 4 He has
very kindly extrapolated the sample of 84 academic lawyers (about
3 per cent.) from his 1989 survey and made it possible to contrast
them with the total of 2,674 respondents. 5 A preliminary analysis
of this rich set of data produces some interesting results, including
a few surprises, and a confirmation of the hypothesis that in most
of Halsey's categories academic lawyers are near the middle of the
academic spectrum.
Halsey's survey suggests that in almost all key respects his profile
of academic lawyers in 1989 very closely resembled the profile of
the academic profession as a whole, especially colleagues in the
Humanities and Social Sciences. In respect of their situation lawyers
were generally more bullish than the rest; they emphatically
denied that the quality of teaching or of research in their discipline
had declined 6 ; they confirmed that there had been an increase in
student numbers in their department during the past decade 7 and
in the quality of applications 8 and no decline in the standards of
students 9 ; fewer than average would have chosen another discipline,
if they had their time again, 10 but rather more might have
chosen another occupation and had thought of moving," which is
hardly surprising, given the rewards of legal practice; lawyers were
somewhat more optimistic about their own prospects of obtaining a
chair, providing they were willing to move to another institution. 12
Overall, the survey figures suggest that, in 1989, morale among
lawyers was less bad than the average. 13
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