Definition in the Criminal Law
| Author | Michael Plaxton |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2005.00565_3.x |
| Published date | 01 September 2005 |
| Date | 01 September 2005 |
REVIEWS
Neil Duxb ury,Frederick Pollock and the English Juristic Tradition,Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004, xxii þ458pp, hb d60.00.
In Frederick Pollock and the English JuristicTradition, Neil Duxbury has written a lively
and informative account of the most prominent English common lawyer of the
late ninetee nth and early twentieth ce nturies. The book begins with a thorough
and entertainingaccount of Pollock’s life and personalattributes. Essentially aVic-
torian in character and outlook, Pollock combined the virtues of moral integrity
and hard work with aloofness, contempt of ignorance and a lack of charisma.
Unlike his great friend OliverWendell Holmes, he was never a successful practi-
tioner, and although he made a career as an academic lawyer, he was a poor tea-
cher, using the academy as a stage from which to speak to a wider world, rather
than to inspire u ndergraduates. If application rather than i nsight marked Pollock
out, his career was long and wide reaching, and he enjoyed success as a treatise
writer and university professor, as editor of the Law Reports, and as a publicist
of the common law and its history.
Although he was Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence in the University of
Oxford, most of Pollock’s work was practical rather than philosophical. As Dux-
bury points out, it was not that he was uni nterested in philosophy, for his most
impressive scholarly achievement was a study of Spinoza. But he regarded this
interest as that of an amateur, which did not in£uence his approach to law. As a
jurist, he was suspicious of grandtheories and of attempts to reduce law tological
jurisprudential schemes, preferring the studyof case law. For Pollock, the besttest
of the soundness of any legal proposition was whether it could be made intelligi-
ble to a jury. He therefore failed to have any discernible in£uence in jurispruden-
tial thought. Instead of identi fying fund amental jurisprude ntial problems and
seeking to set out frameworks to understand them, he left only a scattering of
re£ections on a range of more minor theoretical quandaries. Rather than setting
out his own theory, he often attempted to bring together a range of di¡erent
approaches, which only served to water them down. Since, in his view, philoso-
phical analyses of law properly belonged to the theoryof politics rather than to a
dogmatic science of law, he was often content ^ even in his First Boo k of Jurispru-
dence ^ to leave larger jurisprudential questions to one side.
Pollock is shown tohave been at heart acommon lawyer, whose approachwas
perhaps most shaped by the examples of Sir Edward Coke and Edmund Burke.
Law in his view was not the command of a sovereign: it consisted of the rules
enforced and expanded by judges, who were portrayed as men of character pos-
sessed of ‘a certain continuous drift of thought which is called the legal habit of
mind’ (p 126). Duxbury convincingly argues that Pollock’s stress on good habits
was as much the concern of a Victorian keen on good breeding and education as
rThe Modern LawReview Limited 2005
Published by BlackwellPublishing, 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ,UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
(2005) 68(5)MLR 873^886
To continue reading
Request your trial