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

Pragmatism and Theory in English Law 41
the market. Judges must, of course, have demonstrated professional
skills of the highest calibre prior to their appointment;
and I do not for a moment wish to deprecate the
value of those skills. But it is equally true that academics
must demonstrate exceptional intellectual abilities if they
are to rise to the highest ranks in the academic world, and I
do not know how one is to judge the relative worth of these
differing skills.
Other differences in status are visible in England as
compared with America. For example, I have friends in
America who are regularly called upon to conduct seminars
for judges on the processes of judging; in England,
when someone had the temerity to suggest some years ago
that judges should be given some training in sentencing,
the immediate reaction was to ask who could possibly
train the judges? 88 Or again, consider the occasions on
which the government calls on practitioners or judges for
advice or to act as chairmen of committees charged with
some study of the law or to examine into some incident. It
is very rare that academics are invited to perform such
functions in England, 89 but it is far from rare in America.
90 It is embarrassing for an academic to raise these
matters, so I stress that the only reason that I do so is that
m Sec Ashworth, Sentencing and Penal Policy, (1983) pp. 66-67.
m A noteable, but almost unique, exception was the invitation to Professor
L. C. B. Gowcr to report into the problems of regulating the securities
industry, sec his Report, "Review oflnvcstor Protection," Cmnd. 9125
(1984). Of course academics do now play a prominent role on the Law
Commission and have for long been associated as members of law
reform committees. But such bodies arc nearly always chaired by
judges.
' M For instance, the Chairman of the Study Group appointed by the Chief
Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1971 to inquire into the
caseload of the court was a professor of the Harvard Law School—Professor
Paul Frcund.