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

Law in Culture and Society
ceived needs of fledgling practitioners. Law degrees have concentrated
on the alleged "core" of general practice—providing building
blocks and leaving out great areas of specialisation. Thus
succession, tax, civil procedure, commercial arbitration, and construction
law, are examples of recognised areas of specialised legal
practice which traditionally have received relatively little sustained
scholarly attention. Academic fashion sometimes lags behind areas
in legal practice; sometimes it anticipates them. But at any given
period in the history of legal education and legal scholarship in
England, the focus of legal scholarship has tended to be narrower
than the scope of legal practice—both in respect of fields of law
and of sustained treatment of the law in action from practitioners'
points of view. There are, of course, some areas of legal scholarship—criminology,
sociology of law, labour law, Chinese law—
where the academics' focus of attention has been much broader
than that of practitioners. But these have tended to be minority
options, which usually attract few students.
The newspaper exercise illustrated among other things some of
the difficulties of differentiating law from other phenomena. It
raises in this context the specific question: what is the scope of the
discipline of law? or to put it differently: what precisely are we
studying when we study law? A natural response to such questions
is to seek a general definition of the word "law". But experience
has taught us that this is not likely to be very helpful.
There are some obvious reasons why this is so. First, the word
"law" is regularly used in many different senses in many different
contexts. There is no clear criterion for deciding which of these
meanings we should choose here.
Secondly, and more important, puzzlements and disagreements
about the scope of the discipline of law relate to issues of substance
(what should we be studying when we study law?) rather than
about the meanings of words. What should be the scope of the
study of law is regularly contested among legal scholars, as we
shall see. Some, for example, think that the study of law should be
confined to legal rules made by the State; some would include
"non-state law" such as custom, international law and religious
law; most would include the policies, principles or reasons behind
the rules as well as or as an integral part of the rules themselves;
others would include institutions such as courts, the legal profession,
and the judiciary; and many would include the social, economic
and political context and consequences of legal rules, pro-
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