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

Law in Culture and Society
media. They are public and conflict is the stuff of drama. Law has
it share of headlines, but its main business is the prevention of
disputes and the ordering of behaviour and expectations through
rules and routines and ideas that are taken for granted. One can
use the business pages to illustrate this point. One of the best compliments
that I have heard paid to a law degree by a former student
was that by the time he graduated he was equipped to understand
every page of the Financial Times (including its excellent Arts
section). On January 18, 1994 on a single page one finds allusions
to white knight rescues, convertible preferred shares, vulture funds,
a liquid secondary debt market; there is also the following sentence:
"Profits were struck after a £600,000 exceptional charge,
forecast on flotation, to meet the costs of unwinding and interestrate
hedge". On the same page there are references to the Take-
Over Panel, the Office of Fair Trading, the Independent Television
Commission, and the OECD—all institutions whose existence and
powers are constituted by law. The law generates terms and concepts
that invade specialised areas of activity. In the business pages
there are also many words that are part of everyday use (at least
for some) which derive their most precise, often technical, meanings
from law: company, stocks, dividend, bankruptcy, and privatisation,
for example. The same is more generally true of our
ordinary language: contract, murder, rape, marriage, tenant, alien,
infant, employer, social security.
It would be tedious and unnecessary to take you through the rest
of the newspaper in detail: the advertisements, which on this day
took up only about one-sixth of the space, could be dissected with
a lawyer's eye; one could point to contract, torts, crime and administrative
law on the sports pages; the arts section had less than its
normal share of contract, employment, copyright and censorship
matters; one could point out the range of constitutional, human
rights and international law issues and terms that occur in the foreign
news; or how in making sense of news from abroad it helps
to have some knowledge of Islamic or foreign domestic or private
international law. In trying to understand the Rushdie affair, it helps
to know the meaning and implications of a fatwa. Even with this
impressionistic analysis, enough has been said to illustrate the pervasiveness
of law.
Let us pass on to a different point. One does not need to get
very far into the project to recognise that what is to count as directly
"legal" or "law related" depends on how one has defined the
terms for the purpose of the exercise. Even if one adopts a very