R.I.A. to R.A.E.: Aporia and Amour Propre in the Legal Academy
| Published date | 01 March 2006 |
| Date | 01 March 2006 |
| Author | Peter Goodrich |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663906057598 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
REVIEW ESSAY
R.I.A. TO R.A.E.: APORIA AND
AMOUR PROPRE IN THE LEGAL
ACADEMY
FIONA COWNIE, Legal Academics: Cultures and Identities. Oxford: Hart Publishing,
2004, 227 pp.
PETER GOODRICH
Cardozo School of Law, USA
THE MODERN English law school has a relatively short history. The
postmodern fantasy of Blackstone’s Tower (Twining, 1994) postdates
Blackstone’s Commentaries (1765) by roughly two and a quarter
centuries. That is a short time span among the immemorial patterns and
institutions of law. And it also has to be admitted that even since its modern
and self-effacing inception as an academic subject, the scholarship and pedagogy
of common law have had a distinctly dicey disciplinary history. Such is not, of
course, to say that common law is in any sense a young legal system. On the
contrary, it is the very oldest, so old indeed, that according to the mytholo-
gemes of legal methods – of law’s self-description – it goes back beyond
memory to nature and to God. The leges terrae, we are told, are coeval with
the land itself, a part of the commons, older even than the laws of Greece and
Venice to use Sir John Fortescue’s (1460/1998) exempla. Yet they weren’t
studied in the universities. There was no law degree in the filing of common
law writs. No university doctorate in the tabling and pleading of fines. No
Master’s degree in amerciaments and estreats. No honorifically conferred LL.D
in the uses of the writ of moderata misericordia, the forms of fankalmoign
or frumgyld or friperer decisions made canonikement. For those ‘infinite
particulars’ you needed to shave, dress up darkly, eat your dinners, attend
the parlor games and complete the in-house training available at considerable
expense at the ‘third universitie’, the Inns of Court (Raffield, 2004).
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, www.sagepublications.com
0964 6639, Vol. 15(1), 129–143
DOI: 10.1177/0964663906057598
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