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

Law in Culture and Society
ated into the national court system, a fascinating example of the
interaction between the State and "customary law". The Faculty
of Law of the University of Ghana also contained a rich and, in
some respects, surprising confusion of documents.
In the private sector, in addition to the records of law firms, were
to be found non-governmental organisations offering legal advice
or acting as pressure groups for reform, a women's group involved
in a legal awareness programme, letter-writers sitting outside the
court and even professional witnesses (although they generally do
not keep written records). Lawyers have played a particularly
important role in the history of Ghana and whether or not one
counts the personal papers of a lawyer-politician as a "legal
record", few can doubt that such collections are potentially of great
archival interest.
The findings of the Ghana study were mirrored in a subsequent
study of selected legal institutions in England and Wales. 24 Records
which provide crucial evidence of the law in action in all its many
aspects are created, but are not always managed or preserved, by
a vast range of organisations including, for example, a number of
well-known voluntary bodies concerned with civil liberties, law
reform, miscarriages of justice or filling in gaps in legal services to
the less well-off. Many of these had only rudimentary or no records
management policies. Nearly of all them had failed to attract the
sustained attention of archivists, perhaps because the latter have
had a narrow, court-centred picture of law.
The legal records project illustrates a number of further points
First, it reinforces one lesson of the newspaper exercise: that litigation
is only one small and exceptionally visible part of legal activity
in any society. Secondly, I would suggest that all of the examples
listed above are relatively clear cases of institutions specialised to
law or at least clearly law-related and as such of potential interest
to students of law. However, thirdly, most of the records identified
in this survey were potentially of at least as much interest to historians
and social scientists as to legal scholars. Indeed one can predict
with some confidence that academic lawyers in most countries
will make less use of legal records preserved in national archives
than will other kinds of scholars. This is significant not merely as
a reminder of the obvious point that law is of interest to students
and scholars from other disciplines, but also that there are factors
in academic legal culture that may militate against the rich variety
of legal records being much exploited by the law school community.
Primary legal documents such as contracts, wills, trade agree-
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