Pragmatism and Theory in English Law - College of Social Sciences ...

The Weaknesses of the Pragmatic Tradition 133
vated in recent decades because so few academics now have
any real experience of legal practice. It is clearly difficult if
not impossible for an academic to get a feel for a "practical"
subject like tax or conveyancing if he has no experience of
legal practice. But these difficulties also stem in part from
the relatively low status of the academic legal profession.
One has only to take a subject like legal ethics, and ask how
much weight would be attributed by English practitioners
or judges to a book on this subject by an English academic,
to see why such a subject may have little attractions for an
academic lawyer. Yet the subject is an intensely important
one which raises political controversy from time to time—it
involves, after all profound issues of morality, economics
and the public interest—and academics ought to be
involved in it. Much the same is true of many other subjects
of this character. The expertise is often found exclusively in
the legal profession, or (as in the case, for example, of taxation)
the expertise is divided between the profession and
the civil servants. Academics have scarcely gained a foothold
in many of these subjects.
But academics cannot escape some share of the blame for
their failure to tackle subjects of this kind. What the academics
need to bear in mind is that it is not their task to ape
the practitioners. Clearly, academics who have little or no
contact with private practice cannot hope to become as
expert in the nitty-gritty of a subject as those who are working
with practical issues day in and day out. But academics
ought to be involved in these subjects all the same, because
all of them, no matter how"practical" they may seem, have
implications which repay rational and theoretical study.
Indeed, when things begin to go desperately wrong with
some of these areas of law, the lack of an adequate academic
literature is a major obstacle to rethinking and reform, as