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

Law in Culture and Society
tures and was appalled by the contrast between what he saw as
the Vinerian Professor's complacent glorification of the common
law and the realities of litigation and legal practice. The Commentaries,
especially Book I, provided a more specific target for attack
than the amorphous common law. Bentham the Censor, or critic,
challenged Blackstonethe Expositor first in A Fragment on Government
and later in Comment on the Commentaries. Almost exactly
two centuries later Professor Duncan Kennedy of Harvard used
Blackstone's Commentaries as his target, when he introduced
deconstruction and "trashing" into the armoury of critical legal
studies. 4
It was Bentham's followers rather than Blackstone's who established
the first degree in English law, at the University of London,
later University College (UCL). Ironically, the two founding Professors
at UCL fitted neither's model of the law teacher. John Austin
was Bentham's disciple, but his aim was to establish a descriptive
science of positive law. His colleague Andrew Amos, was a practising
barrister who brought the "fire and thunder" 5 of the courtroom
into the classroom and tried to induct his students into the skills
of practice. These four, however, symbolise their successors. Ever
since then the expositor, the censor, the scientist and the craftsman
have competed to be accepted as the dominant model of the
English scholar-teacher of law.
This book examines the nature and potential of the discipline of
law as part of our general intellectual heritage and in relation to
the legal profession and to society at large. The study of law has
a long history throughout the Western world. In England, however,
the emergence of university-based law schools is a quite recent
phenomenon and, as we shall see, they are still in the process of
coming of age. Their development has made apparent the tensions
between the study of law and its professional practice. In all Western
societies law schools are typically caught in a tug of war
between three aspirations: to be accepted as full members of the
community of higher learning; to be relatively detached, but
nonetheless engaged, critics and censors of law in society; and to
be service-institutions for a profession which is itself caught
between noble ideals, lucrative service of powerful interests and
unromantic cleaning up of society's messes.
These tensions are not necessarily unhealthy. They are reflected
in the metaphor of "Blackstone's Tower". I have chosen my title
for a number of reasons. First, Blackstone could have been the
model for a Hamlyn lecturer. He set out to make the common law