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

Law in Culture and Society
accessible to non-specialists and to exhibit its superiority to other
systems. My aims are more modest and less chauvinistic, but the
concern to make law more accessible is shared.
Secondly, Blackstone as expositor represents the dominant
English academic tradition, which has never gone unchallenged.
Thirdly, Blackstone's tower was not and is not a tower of ivory.
Here, it symbolises English law schools collectively, rather than
any individual institution. Law as a discipline is constantly fed with
practical problems and materials from the "real world": actual
rather than hypothetical cases; proposals for legislative reform; and
social problems from domestic violence and crime to world peace
and environmental survival. Blackstone himself was not only an
expositor: a scholar by temperament, he had wide experience as
a barrister, member of Parliament, judge and academic statesman.
He was only moderately successful as a man of affairs, but as a
writer all of his work was imbued with practical concerns.
Fourthly, Blackstone's tower is argumentative, dialectical, filled
with lively debate; but it is not as chaotic as Babel: some of the
debate is formal, structured, even ritualistic; some is conducted in
a peculiar tongue, the language of the common law. Legal talk has
always been quite varied; recently some spaces have been created
in which one can sometimes hear previously unheard voices telling
their stories, notably women, minorities and the oppressed. When
one contemplates the titles of articles in the rapidly proliferating
legal journals, one wonders how to make sense of it all. So much
seems specialised or obscure or repetitious or trivial, but it is more
like babble than Babel.
A tower is itself an ambiguous symbol, conjuring up images of
ancient fortifications, Victorian follies, and modern high rises, such
as Centre Point or Canary Wharf. The disorganisation of the
common law is often portrayed through architectural analogies.
Blackstone himself compared English Law to "an old Gothic castle,
erected in the days of chivalry but fitted up for a modern inhabitant".
6 His aim was to exhibit "the model of the old house" and to
expose and criticise "the new labyrinth" created by ill-considered
piecemeal legislative interventions. 7 Blackstone emphasised the
evolutionary nature of the common law and its concern with particular,
practical knowledge, both of which are also characteristics
of our law schools. Later an American jurist, Karl Llewellyn, contrasted
the classical lines of codified civilian systems to the crude
architecture of old New England farm-houses . .." like a kind of
Topsy, with neither head nor tail nor plan, that just growed". 8