Law as an Academic Discipline

Although the vast majority of law school graduates are practising lawyers (or judges), the place of law schools at universities is never questioned. Law schools are clearly professional schools charged with the task of conveying the knowledge, the skills and also the ethical commitments germane to the legal vocation. But is law really an academic discipline? At first glance, the answer is obviously yes. Law is definitely a branch of learning and scholarly instruction,1 displaying many of the characteristic indicia of academic disciplines such as academic journals and learned societies. And yet, notwithstanding its proud career as part of the modern university, legal academia faces a serious disciplinary challenge. For traditional doctrinal analysis, the challenge is distinguishing legal scholarship from high-skilled performance by non-academic members of the legal profession.2 The various ‘Law and ... ’ schools, which use ‘the methods of scientific and humanistic inquiry to enlarge our knowledge of the legal system’,3 face a mirror image of the same challenge. If law has no meaning except that which it absorbs from other disciplines and enquiries, is it ‘a discipline in its own right’?4 My question in this chapter is whether law is an autonomous academic discipline, distinct and separate from neighbouring fields or merely an object of academic research that borrows its conceptual framework from the humanities or the social sciences.5 The choice between these two alternatives – and a possible third, middle position – is important both as such and as the foundation of a critical analysis of specific institutional arrangements concerning such issues as professional associations, specialized journals and, most notably, advanced legal education. This chapter investigates the two extreme alternatives of autonomy and assimilation and offers a preliminary account of a midway position, claiming that relevant lessons from the social sciences and the humanities are always potentially relevant to law but never exhaust the theoretical inquiry of it. Past and current theories of law’s autonomy do not fully account for the necessary extra-doctrinal underpinnings of legal materials, nor do they sufficiently appreciate the justificatory burden entailed by the prospective effects of every significant legal pronouncement. These shortcomings, however, do not imply the collapse of law as an academic enterprise robust enough to justify a separate category. Using the theories and methods of other disciplines definitely enriches our understanding of law, but these helpful exercises never suffice because they do not pay appropriate attention to the nature of law as a set of coercive normative institutions and, furthermore, tend to fragment rather than synthesize the interdisciplinary lessons on law.