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

Law in Culture and Society
about the actual operation of the law in practice and, of course,
they hardly qualified as bedside reading. That has changed.
There has been something approaching a revolution in law publishing.
History, politics, sociology, statistics, philosophy, literary
theory, critical commentary on current affairs and much else
besides have found their way into books that still can only be
classified as legal works; at the very least this new material provides
some necessary background to legal rules, so that law is
now said to be studied in its political, social, economic or other
contexts.
The distinction between law in books and law in action is
dissolving as more of the action gets into the books. There is
thus much greater variety in legal literature than there was twenty
years ago. Law books have come out of the age of the wing
collar and the quill pen: their jackets are often in bright, even
garish, colours and a few years ago one leading law publisher
allowed pictures on the cover for the first time in nearly 200
years! So we are not very far from having law books, as well as
books about law—if the distinction still holds—on railway station
bookstalls.
All of this is part of a trend towards a closer integration of law
and other subjects. We have not quite reached the point where
the law is once again seen as one of the great humane subjects,
along with history and literature, as it was in Classical and Medieval
times, and as Blackstone tried to make it in the eighteenth
century. But the study of law has become much broader and
more diverse than it used to be. One result has been to make
much legal literature more accessible to ordinary readers. Law
is far too important, too far-reaching and too interesting not to
be part of general culture".
The original episode took place about 12 years ago. Book shops
have not changed very much, but it is probably true to say that
there has been a significant increase in exposure of law on television,
as is illustrated by such popular series as Crimewatch, LA.
Law, and Streetlaw. Since then there has also developed a "Law
and Literature Movement" which has been hailed by some as a
significant breakthrough in academic law and which has been
attacked by an American academic and Judge, Richard Posner, as
fundamentally misconceived. 15
Even more striking is the extraordinary recent success of American
lawyer-novelists, particularly John Grisham, Scott Turow,
Philip Friedman, and Richard North Patterson, who singly and col-
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