‘A GREAT AND NOBLE OCCUPATION!’: THE HISTORY OF THE SOCIETY OF LEGAL SCHOLARS by FIONA COWNIE AND RAYMOND COCKS
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2010.00520.x |
| Author | WILLIAM TWINING |
| Published date | 01 September 2010 |
| Date | 01 September 2010 |
`A GREAT AND NOBLE OCCUPATION!': THE HISTORY OF THE
SOCIETY OF LEGAL SCHOLARS by FIONA COWNIE AND RAYMOND
COCKS
(Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2009, xv and 276 pp., £25.00)
House histories can be a dreary form of literature, attractive neither to
authors nor a general audience. To celebrate its centenary, the Society of
Legal Scholars
1
has done well in persuading two established scholars who
take legal education seriously to undertake this potentially thankless task.
They too have done well. For its first fifty years, the Society of Public
Teachers of Law was a small, weak organization ± essentially a rather
depressed gentleman's club ± whose main accomplishment was survival.
Raymond Cocks tells this story as a slice of social history with sensitivity
and humour. Starting from 1960, Fiona Cownie recounts a significantly
different tale in terms of growth, professionalization, and a switch of
emphasis from education to scholarship, with chapters on `The Swinging
Sixties'; `The 1970s: Reform Begins'; `The 1980s: A Difficult Decade';
`The 1990s: A Decade of Change'. All of this takes place in the context of
changes in higher education and the place of academic law within it. Scale is
a revealing marker of the pace and extent of change: in 1909 about 60 law
teachers (out of an estimated pool of a hundred) expressed interest in joining
the new organization; in 1955 the President of the Society (Lord Chorley)
`thought' there were only about 230 members; in 2009 the membership
reached 3000 ± 50 times the figure at its inception and twelve times that of
1955.
The authors decided to focus on the detailed history of the Society,
touching lightly on the broader context of which they are both well aware.
Relying largely on the Society's rich but uneven archive (some officers were
magpies, others were ruthless pruners), they enliven the text by extensive
quotations from Presidential addresses, occasional correspondence, and
memoranda submitted to outside bodies. This parade of opinions is quite
revealing of concerns and attitudes at different periods. The approach
inevitably focuses a good deal of attention on parochial themes: the location
and menu of the Annual Dinner; the Society's finances; the status of law
teachers; and their relations with the practising profession and the judiciary.
Eligibility for membership of this modest organization was a persistent
preoccupation: at different times private law tutors, employees of crammers,
Germans (during the First World War), women, and teachers in polytechnics
were excluded ± often amid sharp controversy. Women were first admitted
in 1959. The fact that five of the last twelve Presidents have been women
542
1Ishould, perhaps, declare an interest: during the 1970s I was active as a member and
later as an officer and took positions on some of the controversies about the Society's
role and membership
ß2010 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2010 Cardiff University Law School
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