Socio-legal studies: a challenge to the doctrinal approach

Abstract

The doctrinal approach to teaching and researching law, focused exclusively on traditional legal materials and the techniques required to interpret them (what Margaret Thornton has termed the ‘technocentric’ approach to law1), constituted the dominant mode of law teaching and research until well into the twentieth century.2 In the early years of the century most law graduates came from the ‘golden triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and London universities, where the use of classic textbooks ensured that the legal education offered was doctrinal in nature.3 Since it was graduates of these universities who became law teachers, they continued to foster the doctrinal approach to law. In addition, many provincial law schools were founded as a result of activity by local Law Societies, and as a result they were highly sensitive to the needs of the legal profession.4The pre-eminence of doctrinal law was also reinforced because, until the major expansion of universities brought about by the Robbins Report, many law school staff were parttime practitioners, whose orientation naturally tended to be towards the vocational aspects of law. It was not until after the mid-1960s that law schools began to employ young lecturers who were full-time academics, whose allegiance was to the development of law as an academic discipline, rather than to law as a vocational subject.5

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