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

Law in Culture and Society
ments, commercial paper and even trial records, have to an extraordinary
extent been neglected in legal studies and, in due course,
we shall need to consider why this might be.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter I have tried to illustrate the potential of law as a
subject of study—its pervasiveness, its variety, its vitality, its relevance
to social life at all levels. I have also suggested that the study
of law can provide one kind of way of looking at both practical
problems and social events. Legal thought and language can provide
one set of lenses for interpreting the world. I have introduced
a set of distinctions—between the law in action in society, lawyers'
action and academic law—which overlap in quite complicated
ways. The significance of these distinctions should become clearer
as we continue on our tour. In the next chapters, we shall look at
English law schools as institutions. I shall start with some history.
For I believe that one can only make sense of the institutionalised
study of law and its relationship to law in society and legal practice,
by outlining the story of the development of law schools in the
context of higher education as well as of the legal profession and
legal system. We shall also need to look at the culture of law
schools: their roles and values as institutions, the economic and
political factors that affect them, the aspirations and dilemmas of
teachers and students, and the ideas that underpin the discipline.
Notes
1 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1st ed., 1765-69)
(references are to the Facsimile of the First Edition (ed. S. Katz, 1979)).
2 Canon and Civil Law had been taught in English universities long before Blackstone.
English Law had been taught at the Inns of Court from the Middle Ages.
There had been institutional works before Blackstone, for example by Coke,
Wood and Hale. Blackstone, however, was the first university Professor of English
Law and his Commentaries were more comprehensive and, in some respects,
more systematic than previous English expository works.
3 F. W. Maitland, "English Law", Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th ed., 1910), Vol.
9, at pp. 601-607. A. L. Smith said of this article, which first appeared in the
1902 edition, that it was "the irreducible minimum which every educated man
should read." (F. W. Maitland, 1908).
4 Duncan Kennedy "The Structure of Blackstone's Commentaries" (1979) 28 Buffalo
L. Rev 205.
5 John Baker, "University College and Legal Education, 1826-1976" (1977) Current
Legal Problems 1.
21