CORRESPONDENCE

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1987.tb02575.x
Published date01 March 1987
Date01 March 1987
MAR.
19871
CORRESPONDENCE
267
VIII
Whatever its qualities, Skegg’s book is unsatisfactory in its
perception
of
what forms the corpus
of
medical law in the
1980s.
A
book such as
Skegg
should go further than its predominantly
criminal law base. As more
of
the issues
of
medical law are
litigated, lawyers and others will become increasingly aware that
medical law
is
a subject in its own right.
No
longer can the student
and scholar
of
the subject be content to “read lots of strange
American cases, the odd Commonwealth decision, and maybe
some English nineteenth-century cases on crime,,” he must
consider the pertinent modern English cases and, above all, do
some hard thinking about the legal and ethical issues involved.
Skegg will probably be his starting point
for
the law, at least for
some
of
it, but the subject is still searching
for
a comprehensive
book. ANDREW GRUBB*
CORRESPONDENCE
To
THE
EDITOR
OF
THE
MODERN LAW REVIEW
IN
the
Modern Law Review
for September 1985 an article by
Mr.
P.
Goodrich contains the following:
“Doctrine as teaching demands obedience on the part
of
its students
or
pupils
and it is consequently less than surprising that the doctrinal community should
treat those who do not believe the teachings
or
who wish
to
engage in dialogue
with the primary texts as schismatics, heretics
or
other counsellors
of
despair:
the critics
of
legal doctrine, we are told, have ‘an ethical duty to depart the law
school’ in precisely the same fashion that ‘a professor
of
divinity
for
whom
atheism is the primary message to profess ought to recognise that he has a
conflict
of
interest.’
There is then cited
for
this remarkable proposition an essay by Paul
Carrington,
“Of
Law and the River” in the
Journal
of
Legal Education
for
1984, and the correspondence which followed that essay in the same
Journal
in 1985.
I
do not suppose the
Modern Law Review
is regularly seen by the
distinguished Dean
of
Duke University Law School,
so
perhaps
I
may
point out on his behalf that the above statement
is
a
gross
misrepresentation
of his views (and of the materials cited) in at least two ways. First, it
is
quite clear that Dean Carrington was not talking
of
law
students
at all, but
of
law teachers. And secondly, he was not talking
of
critics
of legal
doctrine (of whom he is one himself) but
of
unbelievers.
Dean Carrington
was addressing his remarks to those law teachers who have no belief in the
whole enterprise
of
law,
who think that
all law
is a fraud
or
a facade. Such
teachers, he suggested, might search their consciences and ask themselves
whether they ought to be teaching
in an insfifufion,
membership
of
which
may be thought predicated on some minimal belief in the enterprise
of
KI
I.
Kennedy,
47
M.L.R.
454
(1984).
*
Fellow
of
Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
I
am grateful to Professor
Ian
Kennedy
of
King’s College, London
for
his
helpful comments on earlier drafts
of
this article.

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT