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

Law in Culture and Society
cesses and institutions. And who would exclude the history,
philosophy or anthropology of law as being of no concern to legal
scholars?
Thirdly, in respect of any of these different conceptions there
will be many borderline cases, yet the problem of whether or not
some particular example is to be treated as falling inside or outside
a precisely drawn boundary is often quite trivial. Precise boundarydrawing
by courts sometimes has important practical consequences,
but in many other contexts whether a borderline case
is classified as "legal" or "non-legal" is not important. It does not
matter for the purposes of the newspaper exercise whether one
treats a report of a routine police investigation of a murder or a
hostile take-over bid as being "legally relevant" or not.
I propose to adopt a broad conception of the subject-matter of
the discipline of law without entering into complex issues of legal
theory to justify this position. In due course we shall come across
alternative, generally narrower, conceptions of the subject and we
can consider some of the pros and cons of such alternative perspectives.
Nor will I concern myself very much with outer boundaries
of my discipline and with borderline cases. Rather, following
the American jurist Karl Llewellyn, I shall adopt the broad and
deliberately vague conception of law as a social institution specialised
to the performing of certain tasks or meeting certain needs
in human groups, especially those groups which we call societies. 20
These tasks include dispute-prevention, dispute-settlement, allocation
of power and authority, and the technology involved in performing
these tasks, including the skills, devices and artefacts that
have been produced by the systematic study of law. 21 In this view
the subject-matter of the study of law includes ideas, principles,
rules, personnel, processes, institutions, skills, and much else
besides. Later we can consider whether and when we can sensibly
place any limits on the field and whether it can be said to have a
core. 22 This broad conception, to which I am generally sympathetic,
fits my present purpose because I am here concerned with
what is in fact studied in law schools—and all of these matters are
in fact studied in at least some law schools.
I shall not try here to justify my choice of perspective theoretically.
But it may be useful to illustrate its application by reference
to a research project in which I was recently engaged. As part of
a wider project on archives policy in the Commonwealth, a team
of us undertook a case-study of legal records in Accra, Ghana. 23
One of the main objectives of the project was to persuade archivists
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