A special relationship? American influences on English legal education, c. 1870–1965

Abstract

This paper describes and analyses the influence of American legal education on English legal scholars, and the vitality or otherwise of the Anglo-American legal community circa 1870–1965. Part one describes the Anglo-American legal community, its leading lights and its leading ideas, and the transatlantic effort to create and establish modern law schools and legal science during c. 1870–1914. Part two examines the divergences that characterised the relationship between American and English legal education and thought, c. 1914–1965 divergences that were so great that some commentators have concluded that the Anglo-American legal community was in terminal decline by 1930. Part three problematizes the supposed decline of the Anglo-American legal community through a consideration of the continuities and convergences that also pervade American and English legal education and thought, c. 1914–1965. During this period, significant transatlantic networks of legal scholars, aided by scholars in other countries and continents, subjected the classical legal orthodoxy to an unprecedented onslaught, and in the process constituted new legal subjects, new areas of expertise, and broadened legal education and scholarship; while other such networks counterattacked, defended and restated the legal orthodoxy. Part four draws on an indicative survey of English legal scholars who studied in the US during c. 1870–1965 to reflect on the mechanisms by which England's would-be jurists studied and taught in America, and the significant, complex and elusive influence of America. In problematizing the influence of the US on England, the analysis of this material is augmented by data derived from interviews with leading English law teachers and scholars undertaken from the 1980's to the present. The final section of the paper (Part five) sketches some conclusions about the influence of American legal education and thought on English legal education and scholarship, and its larger significance. By melding archival and secondary sources with oral history, and bringing to bear both a macro and micro historical approach to the influence of US law schools and jurists on their British counterparts, and the important role of transatlantic networks of legal scholars, it is hoped that the essay will contribute to an understanding of the specifics of American influence and also to the intellectual history of modern legal education.

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank Avrom Sherr for his support and valuable comments on this paper; William Twining for his valuable comments on this paper; and those interviewees whose interviews I have drawn upon in the writing of this essay. I should especially like to thank Léonie Sugarman for her many helpful suggestions for improving my writing.

Notes

Sir Frederick Pollock, “An address delivered at the Commemoration meeting of the Harvard Law School Association” in 1895. Subsequently published in: Sir Frederick Pollock (1904) The Expansion of the Common Law (London, Stevens & Sons), pp. 3–4.

The satirist, Peter Cook, as British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, recounting a summit meeting with US President John F. Kennedy in a sketch Cook performed in Beyond the Fringe, a comedy stage revue devised and performed in the early 1960s.

W. Twining (1997) Law in Context. Enlarging the Discipline (Oxford, Clarendon Press), pp. 5–6.

R.A. Cosgrove (1997) Our Lady of the Common Law: An Anglo-American Legal Community, 1870–1930 (New York, New York University Press), p. 3; pp. 161–279, 291–292; arguing that “By 1930 the sense of legal camaraderie had died…” (p. 3), and that “Since 1930 the legal evolution of the two countries has continued along separate lines” (pp. 291–292).

On the difficulties of determining ‘influence’ in history, the historian, Eric Hobsbawm, quipped that one needs both a telescope and a microscope, to which the common lawyer, Michael Taggart, “would add a camera with a wide-angle lens”: see M. Taggart (2005) Prolegomenon to an intellectual history of administrative law in the twentieth century: the case of John Willis and Canadian administrative law, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 43(3), pp. 223–267, 224–227. On the difficulties of determining influence in the law, see N. Duxbury (2001) Jurists & Judges: An Essay on Influence (Oxford, Hart Publishing), pp. 5–22.

The discussion of the Anglo-American legal community, 1870–1930 in this paper is indebted to Richard. A. Cosgrove's extensively researched study, Our Lady of the Common Law: An Anglo-American Legal Community, 1870–1930 (New York, New York University Press, 1987). However, the paper challenges Cosgrove's thesis that the Anglo-American legal community had ceased to be important by 1930. For an excellent survey of the Anglo-American legal heritage, both engaging and humorous, see, D.R. Coquillette (2004) The Anglo-American Legal Heritage: Introductory Materials, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC, Carolina Academic Press).

H. Tulloch (1988) James Bryce's American Commonwealth. The Anglo-American Background. Studies in History 54 (London, Royal Historical Society), p.125. Ironically, thirty years after the dinner quoted in the text, Harvard Law School (HLS) was close to bankruptcy: see B.A. Kimball (2011) Impoverishing ‘the greatest law school in the world’: the financial collapse of Harvard Law School, 1895–1909, Journal of Legal Education, 61, pp. 4–29. Kimball's fastidious research has revealed that HLS essentially squandered its substantial finances during the administration of Dean Ames from 1895 to 1909, leaving it destitute and unable to recover until the 1960s. “While struggling to recover from the financial disaster over the next four decades, HLS lost what had appeared in 1900 to be an unassailable position of leadership and fell back into the pack of other leading law schools at major universities” (Kimball, 2011, p. 5).

B.A. Kimball (2009) The Inception of Modern Professional Education: C. C. Langdell, 1826–1906 (Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press).

Tulloch, James Bryce's American Commonwealth.

G. Edward White (1993) Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Law and the Inner Self (New York, OUP).

N. Duxbury (2004) Frederick Pollock and the English Juristic Tradition (Oxford, Oxford University Press).

Politically, it was characterised by a suspicion of the coming of democracy, a fear of socialism, disorder and the consequences of majoritarianism, and in economic affairs, a commitment to classical liberalism. These concerns animated much middle class politics and political thought during this period on both sides of the Atlantic: see, for example, H. Jackson (1913) The Eighteen Nineties (London, Grant Richards); G. Dangerfield (1935) The Strange Death of Liberal England (New York, Harrison Smith and Richard Haas); E. Halevy (1970) A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century: the Rule of Democracy, 1905–1914. Halevy's History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century Vol. 6 (London, Benn); J.F.C. Harrison (1990) Late Victorian Britain 1875–1901 (London, Fontana); J. Harris (1993) Private Lives, Public Spirit (Oxford, Oxford University Press); D. Peck (1989) Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). On the connections between this conjuncture and legal thought see, for example, Al. Jones (1967) Thomas M. Cooley and ‘laissez-faire constitutionalism: a reconsideration, Journal of American History, 53, pp. 751–771; C. McCurdy (1975) Justice Field and the jurisprudence of government–business relations: some parimeters of laissez-faire constitutionalism, 1863–1897, Journal of American History, 61, pp. 970–1005; W.E. Forbath (1985) Ambiguities of free labor: labor and the law in the Gilded Age, Wisconsin Law Review, 4, pp. 767–817; H. Gilman (1993) The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence (Durham, NC, University of North Carolina Press); J.A.G. Griffiths (1997) The Politics of the Judiciary, 5th ed. (London, Fontana); A.M. Paul (1960) Conservative Crisis and the Rule of Law (New York, Harper & Row); P.S. Atiyah (1979) The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract, Part III (Oxford, Clarendon Press); B. Abel-Smith and R. Stevens (1967) Lawyers and the Courts : A Sociological Study of the English Legal System, 1750–1965 (London, Heinemann); R. Stevens (1979) Law and Politics. The House of Lords as a Judicial Body, 1800–1976 (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson), pp. 37–406; D. Sugarman (1983) The legal boundaries of liberty’: Dicey, liberalism and legal Science, Modern Law Review, 46, pp. 102–111; and David Sugarman (1996) Bourgeois collectivism, professional power and the boundaries of the state: the private and public life of the Law Society, 1825–1914, International Journal of the Legal Profession, 3, pp. 81–135, 112–115; K.D. Ewing & C.A. Gearty (2000) The Struggle for Civil Liberties. Political Freedom and the Rule of Law in Britain 1914–1945 (Oxford, Oxford University Press).

The Anglo-American legal community embraced the influential and long-standing belief that England and America were linked by a joint inheritance, of which the English constitution, parent of all constitutions in the English-speaking world, was the key element. This view was frequently allied to a belief in the essential unity of ‘the Anglo-Saxon race’, and its central role in the future of society – a view that seemed especially true of the period from 1870 to World War I: see J.W. Burrow (1981) A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); and Anthony Brundage & Richard A. Cosgrove (2007) The Great Tradition: Constitutional History and National Identity in Britain and the United States, 1870–1960 (Stanford, Stanford University Press).

The elite character of the intended audience for academic university education is evident in the celebrated inaugural lectures of Blackstone (1758) and Dicey (1883). Whereas Blackstone extols the virtues of academic university legal education to gentlemen, noblemen and barristers, Dicey devoted the bulk of his inaugural lecture to a demonstration that university legal education is a useful and almost indispensible foundation for the training that barristers receive in chambers. Attorneys and solicitors are strikingly absent from the list of those who might benefit from academic legal education. On Blackstone, see W. Prest (2008) William Blackstone. Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, OUP) and Wilfrid Prest (Ed.) (2009) Blackstone and His Commentaries: Biography, Law, History (Oxford, Hart Publishing); and on Dicey see, R.A. Cosgrove (1981) The Rule of Law: Albert Venn Dicey, Victorian jurist (London, Macmillan).

On the significant influence of Continental European ideas, especially, the work of Savigny, on this project, see, for example, Enid Campbell (1959) German influences in English legal education and jurisprudence in the 19th century,University of Western Australia Annual Law Review, 4, pp. 360–382; P. Stein (1980) Legal Evolution, the Story of an Idea (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); J.W. Burrow (1988) Whigs and Liberals. Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford, Claredon Press), pp. 135–145, 150–151; Mathias Reimann (1990) Nineteenth century German legal science, Boston College Law Review, 31(4), pp. 837–897; Mathias Reimann (1993) A career in itself – The professiorate as a model for American legal academica, in: M. Reimann (Ed.) The Reception of Continental Ideas in the Common Law World 1820–1920 (Berlin, Dunker & Humblot), pp. 165–202; Michele Graziadei (1993) Changing images of the law in XIX century English legal thought (the Continental impulse), in: M. Reimann (Ed.) The Reception of Continental Ideas in the Common Law World, 1820–1920 (Berlin, Dunker & Humblot), pp. 115–64; R. Zimmermann (1996) Savigny's legacy: legal history, comparative law and the emergence of a European legal science, Law Quarterly Review, 112, pp. 576–605; F.W. Maitland (2003), in: D. Runciman & M. Ryan (Eds) State, Trust and Corporation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); Marcel Senn (2007) Legal education in England and the German historical school of law in the nineteenth century, in: A. Lewis, P. Brand & P. Mitchell Law in the City: Proceedings of the Seventeenth British Legal History Conference, London, 2005 (Dublin, Four Courts), pp. 249–261.

Critics argued that the notion of legal science advanced by the founders of modern legal education was superficial; that in important respects, it was closer to theology than to the human sciences; and that the founders' obsession with ‘authority’ was part of the long-standing discourse and culture of the common law, rather than a break with the common law mind. Cf, A.W. B. Simpson (1987) The common law and legal theory, in: A.W.B. Simpson Legal Theory and Legal History. Essays on the Common Law (London, The Hambledon Press), pp. 359–382.

The implication that with a bit of juristic assistance lawyers might resemble mathematicians has its origins in Roman law, Bacon and Savigny: see M. Hoeflich (1986) Law & geometry: legal science from Leibnitz to Langdell, American Journal of Legal History, 30, pp. 95–121.

On the history of the American law school and legal thought since 1850, see, for example, Alfred Z. Reed (1921) Training for the Public Profession of the Law Bulletin 15 (New York, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching) and Alred Z. Reed (1928) Present-Day Law Schools in the United States and Canada (New York, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching); Duncan Kennedy (1975/1998) The Rise and Fall of Classical Legal Thought (Privately printed in Cambridge, MA); Robert W. Gordon (1983) Legal thought and legal practice in the age of the American enterprise, 1870–1920, in: G. Geison (Ed.) Professions and Professional Ideologies in America (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press); and Robert W. Gordon (1984) ‘The ideal and the actual in the law’: fantasies and practices of New York city lawyers, 1870–1910, in: G.W. Gawalt (Ed.) The New High Priests: Lawyers in Post-Civil War America (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press); Robert B. Stevens (1983) Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press); Morton J. Horwitz (1992) The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960 (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press); William P. LaPiana (1994) Logic and Experience: The Origin of Modern American Legal Education (Oxford, Oxford University Press); Laura Kalman (1996) The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press); Steve Sheppard (Ed.) (1999) The History of Legal Education in the United States: Commentaries and Primary Sources (Pasadena, CA, Salem Press); David Kennedy & William Fisher (2006) The Canon of American Legal Thought (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press); Hugh C. Macgill & R. Kent Newmyer (2008) Legal education and legal thought, 1790-1920, in: M. Grossberg & C. Tomlins (Eds) The Cambridge History of Law in America, Vol. II (New York, Cambridge University Press), pp. 36–67; and bibliographic essay, pp.705–708; William W. Fisher III (2008) Legal theory and legal education, 1920–2000, in: M. Grossberg & C. Tomlins (Eds) The Cambridge History of Law in America, Vol. III (New York, CUP), pp. 34–72; and bibliographic essay, pp. 762–771.

On the history of modern legal education and thought in Britain, see Richard L. Abel (1988) The Legal Profession in England and Wales (Oxford, Basil Blackwell), pp. 265, 267, and Table 3.2; Abel-Smith & Stevens Lawyers and the Courts: A Sociological Study of the English Legal System, 1750–1965 (London, Heinemann), chs. 7 and 13; Rosemary Auchmuty (2008) Early women law students at Cambridge and Oxford, Journal of Legal History, 29(1), pp. 63–97; J.H. Baker (1996) 750 Years of Law at Cambridge: A Brief History of the Faculty of Law (Cambridge, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge); and J.H. Baker (2007) Legal Education in London, 1250–1850 (London, Selden Society); Jonathan A. Bush & Alain A. Wijffels (Eds) (1999) Learning the Law: Teaching and the Transmission of Law in England, 1150–1900 (London, Hambledon Press); Andrew Boon & Julian Webb (2008) Legal education and training in England and Wales: back to the future, Journal of Legal Education, 58(1), pp. 79–121; Michael Burrage (1993) From practice to school-based professional education: patterns of conflict and accommodation in England, France and the United States, in: Sheldon Rothblatt & Björn Wittrock (Eds) The European and American University since 1800: Historical and Sociological Essays (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), pp. 142–187; Raymond Cocks (1983) Foundations of the Modern Bar (London, Sweet and Maxwell), especially chs. 2 and 8; Michael Burrage (1988) Sir Henry Maine: A Study in Victorian Jurisprudence (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); Michael Burrage (1999) That exalted and noble science of jurisprudence: the recruitment of jurists with ‘superior qualifications’ by the Middle Temple in the mid-nineteenth century, Journal of Legal History, 20, pp. 62–94; and Michael Burrage (1999) Who attended the lectures of Sir Henry Maine: and does it matter?” in Bush & Wijffels, Learning the Law, pp. 383–396; Fiona Cownie & Raymond Cocks (2009) ‘A Great and Noble Occupation!’ The History of the Society of Legal Scholars (Oxford, Hart); Neil Duxbury (2001) Jurists and Judges: An Essay on Influence (Oxford, Hart); Neil Duxbury(2003) A century of legal studies, in: P. Cane & M. Tushnet (Eds) The Oxford Handbook of Legal Studies (Oxford, Oxford University Press), pp. 950–974; Neil Duxbury (2004) Frederick Pollock and the English Juristic Tradition (Oxford, Oxford University Press); Neil Duxbury (2005) English jurisprudence between Austin and Hart, Virginia Law Review, 91, pp. 1–91; Harold Greville Hanbury (1958) The Vinerian Chair and Legal Education (Oxford, Basil Blackwell); Harry Kirk (1976) Portrait of a Profession: A History of the Solicitor's Profession, 1100 to the Present Day (London, Oyez), ch. 3; F.H. Lawson (1968) The Oxford Law School, 1850–1965 (Oxford, Clarendon Press); Nicola Lacey (2004) A Life of H L.A. Hart (Oxford, Oxford University Press), pp. 112–178; Patrick Polden (2010) The education of lawyers, in: The Oxford History of the Laws of England, Vol. XI, 1820-1914, Part Four, V (Oxford, Oxford University Press); A.W. Brian Simpson (2011) Reflections on The Concept of Law (Oxford, Oxford University Press), chs. 1–3; D. Sugarman (2010) Great beyond his knowing: Morton Horwitz's influence on legal education and scholarship in England, Canada and Australia, in: Daniel W. Hamilton & Alfred L. Brophy (Eds) Transformations in American Legal History II – Essays in Honor of Morton J. Horwitz (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press), pp. 504–542; David Sugarman (2009) Beyond ignorance and complacency: Robert Stevens' journey through Lawyers and the Courts, International Journal of the Legal Profession, 16, pp. 7–31; David Sugarman (1986) Legal theory, the common law mind and the making of the textbook tradition, in: W. Twining (Ed.) Legal Theory and Common Law (Oxford, Basil Blackwell), pp. 26–62; W. Twining (1987) 1836 and all that: laws in the University of London, 1836–1986, Current Legal Problems, 40, pp. 261–299; William Twining (1990) Laws, in: F.M. Thompson (Ed.) The University of London and the World of Learning, 1836–1986 (London, Hambledon Press), pp. 81–114; William Twining (1994) Blackstone's Tower: The English Law School (London, Stevens & Sons/Sweet & Maxwell, ch. 2; William Twining (1997) Law in Context: Enlarging a Discipline (Oxford, Clarendon Press).

The treatise tradition thrived in the US, influencing the character of legal practice and legal education, until it was gradually dethroned by the case book from 1870 onwards. Nonetheless, the legal treatise continues to be important in the US, albeit, as a supplement to the case book and periodical literature: see, generally, Macgill & Newmyer, ‘Legal education and legal thought, 1790-1920’, p. 44.

Readers will, I hope, appreciate that my model, which is based on historical materials, conveys tendencies and taken-for-granted assumptions, rather than hard-and-fast extremes. One can always find counter-examples. Thus, the act of generalisation – of trying to distinguish the wood from the proverbial trees – simplifies the ideas of the jurists concerned. More generally, classical legal science (like all orthodoxies, conservative or otherwise) has tended to be vulgarised by both followers and critics alike, and is often more complicated than ‘the received view’: see, for example, W.L. Morison (1971) John Austin (London, Edward Arnold), ch. 5; D. Sugarman, Legal theory, the common law mind and the making of the textbook tradition, pp. 37–48 (discussing the simplification and distortion of the ideas of Bentham and Austin); Bruce A. Kimball (2007) Langdell on contracts and legal reasoning: correcting the Holmesian caricature, Law and History Review, 25(2), pp. 345–399.

Even on Pollock, who ultimately rejected Austin in favour of what he thought were the insights of Maine's historical jurisprudence: see, Cosgrove, Our Lady of the Common Law, pp. 144–149 and Neil Duxbury, Frederick Pollock and the English Juristic Tradition, ch 3. On Austin's influence on Holmes and Pound, see Cosgrove, Our Lady of the Common Law, pp. 110–126 and 208–210 respectively.

J. Redlich (1914) The Common Law and the Case Method in American University Law Schools (New York, Carnegie Foundation); B.A. Kimball (2006) Mr. Langdell's emblematic abomination: the proliferation of case method teaching, 1890–1915, Historical Education Quarterly, 46(190), pp. 190–244; B.A. Kimball (2011) Before the paper chase: student culture at Harvard Law School, 1895–1915, Journal of Legal Education, 61, pp. 31–66.

An important exception was Maitland, who was contemptuous of analytical jurisprudence: P. B. M. Blaas (1978) Continuity and Anachronism: Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction Between 1890 and 1930 (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff), pp. 240–273; J.W. Burrow (1981) A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), pp. 19, 109, 119–121, 140-141; S. Collini et al. (1983) That Nobel Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); C.H.S. Fifoot (1971) Frederic William Maitland: A Life (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press); Cosgrove, Our Lady of the Common Law, pp. 170, 173; J. Stapleton (1994) Englishness and the Study of Politics: the Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); P.N.R. Zutshi (Ed.) (1995) The Letters of Frederic William Maitland, Volume II. (London, Selden Society), pp. 86–89. See, also, D. Rabban (2009) From Maine to Maitland via America, Cambridge Law Journal, 68, pp. 410–435, which casts new and valuable light on an important network of Anglo-American legal historians that collaborated together during the classical period.

Dicey was the first major ‘classical’ jurist to reduce English public law to a small number of rational principles consistent with the classical orthodoxy: see A. V. Dicey (1885) Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, 1st ed. (London, Macmillan). In effect, Dicey ‘purified’ public law by re-conceptualising and systematising it as a private law subject: see, I.W. Jennings (1935) In praise of Dicey, Public Administration, 13, p. 123; D. Sugarman (1983) The legal boundaries of liberty: Dicey, liberalism and legal science, Modern Law Review, 46(1), pp. 102–116. Critics of Dicey frequently overlook the fact that Dicey largely retracted his celebrated hostility to French droit administrative; but by then the damage was done and Dicey's quip that “we know nothing of administrative law and we wish to know nothing”, took on a life of its own: see, further, A.V. Dicey (1901) Droit Administratif in modern French law, Law Quarterly Review, 302, and F.H. Lawson (1959) Dicey revisited, Political Studies, 109, pp. 207–221.

See, for example, D.R. Ernst (2002) Dicey's disciple on the DC Circuit: Judge Harold Stephens and administrative law reform, 1933–1940, Georgetown Law Journal, 90, p. 787.

K. Haakonssen (1981) The Science of a Legislator. The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); D. Lieberman (1989) The Province of Legislation Determined (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); I. Hont & M. Ignatieff (Eds) (1981) Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); J.G.A. Pocock (1985) Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); A. Broadie (Ed.) (2003) The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), especially chs. 10 and 11.

R. Harrison (1983) Bentham (London, Routledge); P. Schofield (2006) Utility and Democracy: the Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham (Oxford, Oxford University Press); F. Rosen (1983) Jeremy Bentham and Representative Democracy: A Study of the ‘Constitutional Code’ (Oxford, Oxford University Press); L.J. Hume (1981) Bentham and Bureaucracy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); G.J. Postema (1986) Bentham and the Common Law Tradition (Oxford, Clarendon Press); J.H. Burns (1989) Bentham and Blackstone: a lifetime's dialectic, Utilitas, 1, pp. 22–40; D. Lieberman (2000) Economy and polity in Bentham's science of legislation, in: S. Collini, R. Whatmore & B. Young (Eds) Economy, Polity and Society: British Intellectual History 1750–1950 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), pp. 107–134.

Macgill and Newmyer, ‘Legal education and legal thought, 1790–1920’.

Sugarman, ‘Legal theory, the common law mind and the making of the textbook tradition’.

Even in its salad days the classical orthodoxy was the subject of counter-currents and criticism as reflected, for example, in the ideas of Maitland (England) and Holmes (US).

Alexis de Tocqueville (1835 & 1840) Democracy in America, 2 vols. Reprinted in 2000. (Chicago, University of Chicago Press), vol. 1, ch. 16.

W.E. Forbath (2008) Politics, state-building, and the courts, 1870–1920, in: M. Grossberg & C. Tomlins (Eds) The Cambridge History of Law in America, Vol. III. (New York, Cambridge University Press), pp. 643–696, 644.

Robert W. Gordon (2002) Modes of Legal Education and the Social Conditions that Sustain Them. SELA (Seminario en Latinoamérica de Teoría Constitucional y Política) Papers. Paper 5 (Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository), p. 9.

On the freedom of the Inns of Court to manage their own affairs without recourse to incorporation, see J.H. Baker (1986) The Legal Profession and the Common Law: Historical Essays (London, Hambledon Press), ch. 6.

A.W.B. Simpson, ‘The common law and legal theory’, p. 328.

T. J. Johnson (1972) Professions and Power (London, Macmillan).

Simpson, ‘The common law and legal theory’, p. 380.

W. Blackstone (1765) Commentaries on the Law of England, Vol. I (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1765), p. 69.

W.N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley (1963) A History of Legal Dress in Europe until the end of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, Clarendon Press); J.H. Baker (1975) History of the gowns worn at the English Bar, Costume, 9, p. 15; J.H. Baker (1978) A history of English judges robes, Costume, 12, pp. 27–39; J.H. Baker (1984) The Order of Serjeants at Law, 1383–1875 (London, Selden Society); J.H. Baker (1985) The Legal Profession and the Common Law (London, Hambledon Press); J.H. Baker (1992) Appendix, in: Court Dress – A Consultation Paper Issued on Behalf of the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice (London, HMSO); D. Pannick (1992) Advocates (Oxford, Oxford University Press); A. Hunt (1995) Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Regulation (London, Macmillan); T. Woodcock (2003) Legal Habits. A Brief Sartorial History of Wig, Robe and Gown (London, Ede and Ravenscroft); P. Raffield (2004) Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558–1660 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

In other words, the profession was constituted by a double discourse which yoked professional independence and professional deference. For a valuable study of the character of professional life at the Bar, and its confines, in the nineteenth century, see Raymond Cocks (1983) Foundations of the Modern Bar (London, Sweet & Maxell).

Abel-Smith and Stevens, Lawyers and the Courts; A. Offer (1981) Property and Politics 1870–1914: Landownership, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Reprinted, with a new preface by Gregg Revivals in 1992); W.W. Pue (1987) Exorcising professional demons: Charles Rann Kennedy and the transition to the modern Bar, Law and History Review, 5, pp. 135–174; W.W. Pue (1987) Rebels at the Bar: English barristers and the county courts in the 1850s, Anglo-American Law Review, 16, pp. 303–352; W.W. Pue (1990) Moral panic at the English Bar: paternal v. commercial ideologies of legal practice in the 1860s, Law and Society Inquiry, 15, pp. 49–118; G. Lewis (1983) Lord Atkin (London, Butterworths), pp. 132–157; A.W.B. Simpson (1992) In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention without Trial in Wartime Britain (Oxford, Oxford University Press); L. Star (1992) Julius Stone: An Intellectual Life (Melbourne, Oxford University Press); D. Sugarman (1995) Who colonised whom? Reflections on the intersection between accountants, lawyers and the law, in: Y. Dezalay & D. Sugarman (Eds) Professional Competition and Professional Power: Lawyers, Accountants and the Social Construction of Markets (London, Routledge), pp. 226–240, 227–230; Sugarman, ‘Beyond ignorance and complacency: Robert Stevens’ journey through lawyers and the courts', pp. 18–22.

The Inns of Court provided some formal lectures and moots for those intending to practice as barristers from the middle ages to the end of the seventeenth century. However, the teaching function of the Inns collapsed in the eighteenth century and was not revived until the mid-nineteenth century, when it operated in an ad hoc and limited fashion; thus, the persistence and significance of apprenticeship in the training and education of early modern and modern lawyers. See, further, J.H. Baker (1990) The Third University of England: The Inns of Court and the Common Law Tradition (London, Selden Society); J.H. Baker (2000) Readers and Readings in the Inns of Court and Chancery (London, Selden Society) and J.H. Baker (2001) The Law's Two Bodies (Oxford Oxford University Press), pp. 73–90; C.W. Brooks (1998) Lawyers, Litigation and English Society since 1450 (London, Hambledon Press), ch. 6; C.W. Brooks & M. Lobban (1999) Apprenticeship or academy? The idea of a law university, 1830–1860, in: J.A. Bush & A.A. Wijffels (Eds) Learning the Law: Teaching and the Transmission of Law in England, 1150–1900 (London, Hambledon Press), pp. 353–382; D. Lemmings (1990) Gentlemen and Barristers: The Inns of Court and the English Bar, 1680–1730 (Oxford, Oxford University Press), ch. 4; D. Lemmings (2000) Professors of the Law: Barristers and English Legal Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press), ch. 4 and Appendix B.

‘Crammers’ were so called because they were associated with that mode of legal education and testing that put a premium on memorizing (‘cramming’) rules and their exceptions.

A three-tier system of examinations for solicitors – a preliminary general knowledge examination on entry, and a intermediate examination taken by clerks during their apprenticeship (articles) which augmented the final examination taken prior to admission – was introduced by the Solicitors Act 1860. In 1872 examinations became compulsory for would-be barristers.

Cf. Brooks & Lobban, ‘Apprenticeship or academy? The idea of a law university, 1830–1860.

Unqualified people continued to advertise their legal advice services until the late nineteenth century, while what today we would call estate agents, debt collectors, auctioneers, general agents, law stationers, arbitrators, accountants and a host of public officials competed with each other as well as with solicitors and barristers over certain fields of work. The sociology of the professions has rightly stressed the importance of studying the professions comparatively, as a network of intricate relations, continually doing battle to defend and extend their respective jurisdictions: A. Abbott (1988) The Systems of Professions (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). My goal in this section is to begin to map out how this body of work might be complemented and recast so that it addresses professional inter-action between lawyers and legal academics. See, further, Y. Dezalay & D. Sugarman (Eds) (1995) Professional Competition and Professional Power: Lawyers, Accountants and the Social Construction of Markets (London, Routledge).

Brooks, Lawyers, Litigation and English Society since 1450; Sugarman, A Brief History of the Law Society, pp. 1–2.

Kirk, Portrait of a Profession, pp. 69–72.

Sugarman, ‘Who colonised whom? Reflections on the intersection between accountants, lawyers and the law’.

In 1971, for example, it was officially estimated that about 95% of those going to the English Bar had university degrees, with 85% of them having read law. In contrast, less than half of those becoming solicitors had law degrees: Report of the Committee on Legal Education (1979) Cmnd. 4595 (London, HMSO), pp. 21–28.

The Solicitors Act 1922 exempted law graduates from the Intermediate examination, and, following the 1934 reorganization of the Bar examinations into discrete Part I and Part II examinations, graduates were finally exempted from the whole of Part I.

M. Burrage (1993) From practice to school-based professional education: patterns of conflict and accommodation in England, France, and the United States, in: S. Rothblatt & B. Wittrock (Eds) The European and American University since 1800: Historical and Sociological Essays 147 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); A. Boon & J. Webb (2008) Legal education and training in England and Wales. Back to the future, Journal of Legal Education, 58(1), pp. 79–121; 87.

See, further, the important work of Michael Burrage (1989) Revolution as a starting point for the comparative analysis of the French, American and English legal profession, in: R.L. Abel & P.S.C. Lewis (Eds) Lawyers in Society, Vol. III (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press), pp. 322, 351–60; Michael Burrage (2006) Revolution and the Making of the Contemporary Legal Profession: England, France, and the United States (Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press), pp. 253–326, 434–461. See, also, David Sugarman (1996) Bourgeois collectivism, professional power and the boundaries of the state: the private and public life of the Law Society, 1825-1914, International Journal of the Legal Profession, 3, pp. 81–135, 83–85; Gordon, ‘Modes of legal education and the social conditions that sustain them’, pp. 9–10.

Jerold Auerbach (1976) Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (New York, Oxford University Press); Robert Stevens (1983) Law School. Legal education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press), ch. 6. England also experienced alarm at ethnic newcomers entering the legal profession. However, limiting the numbers entering the profession was less of an issue than in the United States, and there was no formal effort to restrict their entry to the profession – largely because the proportion of immigrant and other ‘foreign’ lawyers in England was much smaller than in the United States: see Jack Beatson (2004) Aliens, enemy aliens, and friendly enemy aliens: Britain as a home for emigré and refugee lawyers, in: J. Beatson & R. Zimmerman (Eds) Jurists Uprooted. German-Speaking Emigré Lawyers in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford, Oxford University Press).

Stevens, Law School, ch. 10 and 11.

Such as the Uniform Sales Act of 1906, whose chief reporter was Harvard's, Samuel Williston; and the Model Penal Code of 1952, drafted by Herbert Wechsler, of Columbia Law School. The most celebrated academic–practitioner collaboration is the longest and most elaborate of the uniform acts, the Uniform Commercial Code (original version, 1952). The principal drafters of the Code were leading legal scholars, several of whom were associated with legal realism, including Karl N. Llewellyn, Soia Mentschikoff and Grant Gilmore. See, further, Robert W. Gordon (2008) The American legal profession, 1870–2000, The Cambridge History of Law in America, Vol. III, M. Grossberg & C. Tomlins (Eds) (New York, Cambridge University Press), pp. 87–90: as Gordon observes, “The school-bar alliances were always somewhat precarious, because as each sector evolved their ideas and interests often diverged”: ‘The American legal profession, 1870-2000’, p. 90.

See N.E.L. Hull (1990) Restatement and reform: a new perspective on the origins of the American Law Institute, Law and History Review, 8, p. 55.

More recent examples of Supreme Court appointments include Justices William O. Douglas, Abraham Fortas, Stephen Breyer (an alumnus of Harvard and Oxford) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

C. Harlow (1994) Changing the mindset: the place of theory in English administrative law, Oxford Journal Legal Studies, 14, p. 419.

R.W. Gordon (2004) Professors and policy-makers: Yale Law School faculty in the New Deal – and after, in: Anthony T. Kronman (Ed.) History of the Yale Law School: The Tercentennial Lectures (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press); and R.W. Gordon (2008) The American legal profession, 1870–2000, in: M. Grossberg & C. Tomlins (Eds) The Cambridge History of Law in America, Vol. III (New York, Cambridge University Press), pp. 73–126, 87–92.

Contrast the American situation as described here with the situation in England, where the ghost of Dicey continued to temper the recognition and development of administrative law. Even passionate anglophiles, such as Frankfurter, despaired at the impoverished state of English administrative law: “The persistence of the misdirection that Dicey has given to the development of administrative law strikingly proves the elder Huxley's observation that many a theory survives long after its brains are knocked out”: F. Frankfurter (1938) Foreword. Discussion of current developments in administrative law, Yale Law Journal, 47, pp. 515, 517.

Sociological jurisprudence views law as a means to promote social welfare, requiring legislators and judges who will make law in light of society's constantly evolving needs and interests. On Pound, see, David Wigdor (1974) Roscoe Pound: Philosopher of Law (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press); and N.E.H. Hull (1997) Roscoe Pound and Karl Llewellyn: Searching for an American Jurisprudence (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).

With its emphasis on non-rational motives in judging, and its effort to introduce modern notions of empirical research into the study and teaching of law. Many of the key primary sources on the legal realist movement have been brought together in William Fisher, Morton Horwitz & Thomas Reed (1993) American Legal Realism (New York, Oxford University Press). See, further, William Twining (1973) Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson); Laura Kalman (1986) Legal Realism at Yale 1927–1960 (Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press); J. H. Schlegel (1995) American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science (Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press); Hull, Roscoe Pound and Karl Llewellyn.

L.C.B. Gower (1950) English legal training, Modern Law Review, 13, p.198; P.S. Atiyah (1987) Pragmatism and Theory in English Law (London, Stevens).

Leonard Schwarz (2004) Professions, elites, and universities in England, 1870–1970, Historical Journal, 47(4); Ross McKibbin (1998) Classes and Cultures. England 1918–1951 (Oxford, Oxford University Press), ch. VI.

A.W. Brian Simpson (2006) Herbert Hart elucidated, Michigan Law Review, 104, p. 1437; and A.W. Brian Simpson (2007) The Salmond lecture, Victoria University WLR, 38, pp. 669–687. For a detailed and often hilarious account of law at Oxford in the 1950s, based on Brian Simpson's personal experience of studying and teaching law at Oxford in the 1950s and 1960s, see A.W. Brian Simpson (2011) Reflections on the Concept of Law (Oxford, Oxford University Press), pp.1–88.

R. Wettach (Ed.) (1947) A Century of Legal Education (Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press); L.C.B. Gower (1950) English legal training, Modern Law Review, 13, p. 137; K.C. Davis (1961) The future of judge-made public law in England, Columbia Law Review, 61, p. 201; Abel-Smith & Stevens, Lawyers and the Courts, chs. vii and viii; Q. Johnstone & D. Hopson (1967) Lawyers and their Work (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill), ch. iv; W.L. Twining (1967) Pericles and the plumber, Law Quarterly Review, 83, p. 396; Abel-Smith & Stevens, In Search of Justice, ch. x; L.O. Jaffe (1969) English and American Judges as Lawmakers (Oxford, OUP), ch. v; R. Stevens (1985) Basic concepts and current differences in English and American law, Journal of Legal History, 6, pp. 336–346.

By the 1980s, it was argued that the gulf between English and American law was characterised by the low creative role assumed by English judges, their pusillanimous handling of legislation, a tight professional caste, legal positivism, formalist legal theory and education; while the American system, conversely, combined judicial activism with inefficient legislation, an open profession and instrumentalist legal theory and education. English law tends in these respects towards the high ‘formal’ and low ‘substantive’: for example, strict stare decesis (source formality), rule rather than principle orientation even to the point of arbitrariness (content formality), narrow interpretation of precedents and statutes (interpretative formality), lack of discretion (mandatory formality) – American law being almost always in the opposite comer: P.S. Atiyah & R.S. Summers (1987) Form and Substance in Anglo-American Law (Oxford, Clarendon Press) – although the authors emphasised that such contrasts were inevitably simplistic.

Compare Richard L. Abel (1989) Comparative sociology of legal professions, in: Richard L. Abel and P. S. C. Lewis (Eds) Lawyers in Society. Comparative Theorie (Berkeley, University of California Press), pp. 80–153, Table 5 with Richard L. Abel (1988) The Legal Profession in England and Wales (Oxford, Basil Blackwell), Table 3.2.

Ibid., p. 265 and Table 3.2.

Ibid., p. 267.

In 1949, 57% of those called to the Bar were university graduates, and just 40% were law graduates; in 1956, 44% of admitted solicitors were university graduates, and only about a third were law graduates; Abel, The Legal Profession in England and Wales, Tables 1.5, 2.3.

R. Abel (2009) Law school, International Journal of the Legal Profession, 16, pp. 49–58, 50–51.

N. Lacey (2004) A Life of H.L.A. Hart (Oxford, Oxford University Press), ch. 6 and 7; Simpson, Reflections on the Concept of Law, ch. 3.

W.L. Twining (1979) Academic law and legal philosophy: the significance of Herbert Hart, Law Quarterly Review, 95, p. 557.

H.L. A. Hart (1961) The Concept of Law (Oxford, Clarendon Press), 2nd ed., 1994.

Twining, ‘Academic law and legal philosophy: the significance of Herbert Hart’; Lacey, A Life of H.L.A. Hart.

D. Sugarman (2005) Hart interviewed: H.L.A. Hart in conversation with David Sugarman, Journal of Law and Society, 32, pp. 267–293.

See, further, F. Cownie & R. Cocks (2009) A Great and Noble Occupation! (Oxford, Hart), pp. 147–149.

H. Street (1979) The university law teacher, Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law, 14, pp. 243, 247.

W.L. Twining (1980) Goodbye to Lewis Eliot: the academic lawyer as scholar, Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law, 15, p. 2.

By way of personal anecdotes, J.A. Jolowicz, Professor of Comparative Law, Cambridge University, (1976–1993), recounted that when during the 1950s he asked his mentor, Professor C.J. Hamson, whether he should register for a Cambridge PhD, Hamson responded: “Certainly not. No gentleman takes a PhD. That's for foreigners and scientists” (Professor J.A. Jolowicz, interview with David Sugarman, 6 December 1988). This ambivalence towards the PhD persisted until at least the 1970s. When the author, as an undergraduate law student in 1969, asked his undergraduate personal tutor whether he might study for a PhD, the tutor responded: “No. PhDs are only for people who don't get Firsts”.

W.L. Twining (1980) Goodbye to Lewis Eliot, p. 4.

Osgoode Hall Law School in Ontario was established in 1889 with the aspiration of becoming ‘the Harvard of the North’. Dalhousie Law School and Harvard Law School had a close relationship from the early 1920s, when Dalhousie law graduates first went to Harvard to pursue postgraduate study: see J. Willis (1979) A History of Dalhousie Law School (Toronto, University of Toronto Press), p. 88; and E. Griswold (1981) Book review, Journal of Legal Education, 31, p. 679. J.E. Bickenbach & C.I. Kyer (1983) The harvardization of Caesar A. Wright, University of Toronto Law Journal, 33, p. 162 concerns the Law School of the University of Toronto. On the American turn in Canadian legal education and thought, see, generally (1983) Law and Learning: Report to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada by the Consultative Group on Research and Education in Law (Ottawa, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada). Professor Harry Arthurs (Osgoode Hall Law School) chaired the Consultative Group and was the principal author of its report; W. Pue (1996) Common law legal education in Canada's age of soap, light and water, Manitoba Law Journal, 23, p. 654; H. Arthurs (1998) The political economy of Canadian legal education, Journal of Law and Society, 25, pp. 14–32. On the shift within Israeli legal education away from English and Continental European models of legal education towards elite American models – a shift that began post-1967, faced resistance in the 1980s, and gained momentum in the 1990s; see Pnina Lahav (2009) American moment[s]: when, how, and why did Israeli law faculties come to resemble elite US law schools?, Theoretical Inquiries in Law, 10, pp. 653–679.

M. Bulmer (1987) Pity the poor cousins, Times Higher Education Supplement, January 23, p. l3.

Contrast Perry Anderson (1968) Components of the national culture, New Left Review, I/50, July–August, and Perry Anderson (1964) The origins of the present crisis, New Left Review, 23, pp. 26–53; and M.J. Weiner (1981) English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press) with J.W. Burrow (1966) Evolution and Society (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); S. Collini, D Winch & J. Burrow (1983) That Noble Science of Politics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press); L. Goldman (1983) The origins of British ‘social science’, Historical Journal, 26, pp. 587–616.

Erwin Griswold served as Harvard Law School Dean from 1946 to 1967.

Eugene Rostow became dean of Yale Law School in 1955, a post he held until 1965.

Erwin N. Griswold Papers, Harvard Law School, Subseries G 332-1 ENG's England Trip, 1953; 332–334 England Trip, July-August 1957. I am grateful to David Warrington, Librarian for Special Collections at Harvard Law School, for his assistance in this matter.

Some of the leading lights beyond the US included John Willis and Cecil Wright (Canada), Julius Stone (England, and subsequently, Australia) and Wolfgang Friedmann (Berlin-born, England, Australia and eventually, the US). On the importance of personal and professional networks in the development of legal thought during the period under consideration see, Hull, Roscoe Pound and Karl Llewellyn, Introduction.

See, further, K. Martin (1953) Harold Laski. A Biography (London, Gollancz); I. Kramnick & B. Sheerman (1993) Harold Laski: A Life on the Left (London, Hamish Hamilton); M. Newman (1993) Harold Laski, A Political Biography (London, Macmillan).

R. Dahrendorf (1995) A History of the London School of Economics and Political Science 1895–1995 (Oxford, Oxford University Press), p. 225, and generally, pp. 223–232. See, also, R. Gwynedd Parry (2010) David Hughes Parry. A Jurist in Society (Cardiff, University of Wales Press), pp. 40, 55, 57–59.

Other American legal figures with whom Laski corresponded included Brandeis, Cardozo, Frank and Maurice Cohen.

Laski's interest in law was kindled by his reading of Maitland while at Oxford; and Maitland's influence (along with that of Duguit and Gierke) is evident in Laski's advocacy of a pluralist conception of sovereignty.

Cosgrove, Our Lady of the Common Law, p. 254.

However, Laski was critical of some aspects of Harvard education. For example, he argued that the Oxbridge system of tutorials better served the goals of humanistic education relative to the American system of formal lectures.

Laski to Holmes, 7 August 1925, in: M. de Wolfe Howe (Ed.) (1953) Holmes-Laski Letters, Vol. I (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press), p. 774.

Including Holmes' critique of the Anglo-American orthodoxy that judges were, or could be, wholly impartial arbiters; and Holmes' emphasis that the life of law is experience not logic. See, further, R.W. Gordon (Ed.) (1992) The Legacy of Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr. (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press).

Including the ideas of Continental jurists that he had first encountered at Harvard, notably, Duguit. cf. C. Harlow (2011) The Influence of Léon Duguit on Anglo-American legal thought, in: F. Melleray (Ed.) Autour de Leon Duguit (Brussels, Bruylant), pp. 227–254.

Report of the Legal Education Committee, Cmd 4663, (1934). See, further, Abel-Smith & Stevens Lawyers and the Courts, pp. 184–185 and Cownie & Cocks, ‘A Great and Noble Occupation!’, pp. 50–51.

C. Glasser (1987) Radicals and refugees: the foundation of the Modern Law Review and English legal scholarship, Modern Law Review, 50, pp. 688–696; J. Beatson & R. Zimmerman (Eds) (2004) Jurists Uprooted. German-Speaking Emigré Lawyers in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford, Oxford University Press).

W. Robson (1937) Editorial introduction, Modern Law Review, 1, p. 1. See, further, C. Glasser ‘Radicals and refugees’, p. 688; C. ‘The influence of Léon Duguit on Anglo-American legal thought’.

Cohen, who was trained in both law and philosophy, served both as a law professor at Columbia Law School, and was brought into the Roosevelt administration during the New Deal. Cohen's most famous contribution to contemporary critiques of legal formalism was (1935) Transcendental nonsense and the functional approach, Columbia Law Review, 35, pp. 809–889; and it remains among the most-cited law review articles ever written.

Cohen defined functionalist as “an assault upon all dogmas and devices that cannot be translated into terms of actual experience”: ‘Transcendental nonsense and the functional approach’, pp. 809, 820, 822.

Glasser, ‘Radicals and refugees’, p. 692.

R. Rawlings (1997) Distinction and diversity: law and the LSE, in R. Rawlings (Ed.) Law, Society, and Economy. Centenary Essays for the London School of Economics and Political Science 1895–1995 (Oxford, Clarendon Press), p. 7.

Martin Loughlin describes this as the functional style in public law: see M. Loughlin (2005) The functional style in public law, University of Toronto Law Journal, 55, p. 361, and M. Loughlin (1992) Public Law and Political Theory (Oxford, Clarendon Press), ch. 6.

The network also included the English-born and Oxford and Harvard-educated, John Willis. Willis' work on administrative law was highly regarded by Frankfurter (Willis' supervisor at Harvard), Laski and Robson. Subsequent to Laski's inability to find Willis a job at LSE, Willis settled in Canada (principally at Dalhousie) where he founded Canadian Realist-inspired administrative law: On Willis, see R.C.B. Risk (1985) John Willis – A tribute, Dalhousie Law Journal, 9, p. 521 and R.C.B. Risk (1997) In memoriam: John Willis, University of Toronto Law Journal, 47, p. 301; M. Taggart (2005) Prolegomenon to an intellectual history of administrative law in the twentieth century: the case of John Willis and Canadian administrative law, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 43(3), pp. 223–267.

Importantly, they sought to transcend the individualism-collectivism dualism – another aspect of the Diceyian inheritance – which they argued obscured the public policy issues at stake.

B. Crick (2004) Robson, William Alexander (1895–1980), in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, Oxford University Press). See, further, C. Harlow & C. Glasser (1997) Legal services and the alternatives: the LSE tradition, in: R. Rawlings (Ed.) Law, Society, and Economy. Centenary Essays for the London School of Economics and Political Science 1895–1995 (Oxford, Clarendon Press), ch. 15.

W.A. Robson (1947) Justice and Administrative Law, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1928), pp. xvii–xviii. Robson, like several of his Anglo-American compatriots was also influenced by Continental European thinkers, in his case, the most important being Geny.

J.A.G. Griffith & H. Street (1963) Principles of Administrative Law (London, Pitman) and H. Street (1963) Freedom, the Individual and the Law (London, Penguin). cf M. Loughlin (2009) Why the history of English administrative law is not written, in: D. Dyzenhaus, M. Hunt & G. Huscroft (Eds) A Simple Common Lawyer: Essays in Honour of Michael Taggart (Oxford, Hart Publishing), pp. 151–178. On the influence or otherwise of American legal culture and public law on British legal ideals, and a shared vision of democratic legal theory, see I. Loveland (Ed.) (1995) A Special Relationship? American Influences on Public Law in the UK (Oxford, Clarendon Press).

H. Street (1953) Governmental Liability: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

H. Street (1956) The Law of Torts, 1st ed. (London, Butterworths).

H. Street & D.W. Elliott (1968) Road Accidents (London, Allen Lane, Penguin Books). It was the inaugural title in the new Law and Society series edited by O. Kahn-Freund and K.W. Wedderburn, both of whom had longstanding associations with the Law Department at LSE and US law schools.

In the case of road accidents, Street acknowledged the assistance that he had received from Michigan law professor, Alfred F. Conard, and the lead author of (1964) Automobile Accident Costs and Payments: Studies in the Economics of Injury Reparation (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press). Conard was a pioneer in the field of no-fault compensation schemes.

The other important figure in the development of civil liberties at Cambridge was Paul O'Higgins, who was the author of Cases and Materials on Civil Liberties (1980), one of the first cases and materials in the field.

On D.G.T. Williams, see, for example, Bob Hepple (2009) Obituary: Sir David Williams, The Guardian, September 22.

The discussion of Gower and Loss derives, in part, from the author's interview with L.C.B. Gower of 1988, and D. Sugarman (1998) In memoriam, Jim Gower and Louis Loss: doyens of corporate law and exemplars of the Anglo-American ‘special relationship, The Company Lawyer, (March), pp. 65 and 96. On the important links between Gower, Loss and progressive South African legal scholarship and education, see Ellison Kahn (1999) The late Louis Loss and the late Jim Gower, South African Law Journal, 116, pp. 421–432.

L. Loss (1951) Securities regulation (Boston, MA, Little, Brown & Co.). Justice Douglas in 1951 described it as “the indispensable volume on the desks of those whose work or studies take them into the now complicated world of corporation finance”, (1952), Book Review, California Law Review, 40, p. 636; and Jerome Frank ventured “to guess that it will be the Wigmore in its field” (Letter From Jerome Frank to Little, Brown & Co., 15 October 1951, cited by W.L. Cary (1962) Review of Loss, Securities Regulation, Harvard Law Review, 75, pp. 857–862, 857.

L.C.B. Gower (1954) Modern Company Law, 1st ed. (London, Stevens).

A. Berle & G. Means (1932) The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York, Macmillan).

Loss, L. (1955) Book review, Yale Law Journal, June, pp. 1057–1065.

One such student was A.J. Boyle, a Loss SJD student, and subsequently Professor of Company Law at Queen Mary College, London University.

L.C. B. Gower (1967) Independent Africa: The Challenge to the Legal Profession (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press).

Kahn-Freund moved to the Oxford Chair in Comparative Law in 1964, in part, because it was likely to entail lighter teacher duties and provide greater opportunities for writing and research.

Part 1, 1984; Part 2, 1985 (London: HMSO, Cmnd 9125). R. White (1984) The review of investor protection. The Gower Report, The Modern Law Review, 47, pp. 553–566.

C. Harlow & C. Glasser (1997) Legal services and the alternatives: the LSE tradition, in: R. Rawlings (Ed.) Law, Society, and Economy. Centenary Essays for the London School of Economics and Political Science 1895–1995 (Oxford, Clarendon Press).

R. Goff & G. Jones (1966) The Law of Restitution, 1st ed. (London, Stevens).

The author's interviews with Professors Roy Goode (Queen Mary College, London University, 30 October 1988) and Clive Schmitthoff (London, 1988).

P. Atiyah (1970) Accidents, Compensation and the Law (London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson).

Sugarman, ‘Great beyond his knowing’.

R. Dworkin (1977) Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press); R. Dworkin (1986) Law's Empire (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press); R. Dworkin (2011) Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press).

See, for example, R. Folsom and N. Roberts (1995) The Warwick story: being led down the contextual path of law, in: G. Wilson (Ed.) Frontiers of Legal Scholarship (London, Wiley), pp. 21–33; B. Roshier and H. Teff (1980) Law and Society in England (London, Tavistock Publications); H. Genn (1987) Hard Bargaining: Out of Court Settlement in Personal Injury Actions (Oxford, Clarendon Press); D.J. Galligan (Ed.) (1995) Socio-Legal Studies in Context: Oxford Centre Past and Future (London, Wiley-Blackwell); R. Cotterrell (1997) Law's Community: Legal Theory in Sociological Perspective (Oxford, Clarendon Press); J.C. McCrudden (2006) Legal research and the social sciences, Law Quarterly Review, 122, pp. 632–650.

P. Fitzpatrick & A. Hunt (Eds) (1987) Critical Legal Studies (Oxford, Blackwell); P. Fitzpatrick (Ed.) (1991) Dangerous Supplements: Resistance and Renewal in Jurisprudence (London, Pluto Press); I. Grigg-Spall & P. Ireland (Eds) (1992) The Critical Lawyers Handbook (London, Pluto).

J.C. Smith (2004) Harry Street, 1919–1984, in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Other prominent British users of the case method of teaching include Ronald Maudsley and Sir J.C. Smith, see Appendix (below).

The author's interview with Professor Sir Bob Hepple (Cambridge, July 2011).

Twining, Blackstone's Tower; Sugarman, ‘Great beyond his knowing’; F. Cownie (2004) Legal Academics. Culture and Identities (Oxford, Hart); F. Cownie (Ed.) (2010) Stakeholders in the Law School (Oxford, Hart Publishing).

E. Purcell (1973) The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, KY).

On the legal process movement, see James Boyle (1993) Legal realism and the social contract: Fuller's public jurisprudence of form, private jurisprudence of substance, Cornell Law Review, 78, p. 371; G. Peller (1988) Neutral principles in the 1950s, University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, 21, p. 561; G. Edward White (1973) The evolution of reasoned elaboration: jurisprudential criticism and social change, Virginia Law Review, 59, p. 279.

Cited in Stevens, ‘Basic concepts and current differences in English and American law’, p. 340.

Twining, ‘Academic law and legal philosophy’; Lacey, A Life of HLA Hart.

The author's interview with Alan Hunt, (London, 1988).

W. Twining (1973) Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

A. Hunt (1978) The Sociological Movement in Law (London, Macmillan).

Hazeltine and Holland at Cambridge in 1920s and 1930s (both of whom were close to Goodhart), and Lawson at Oxford in 1950s, were among the key ‘talent spotters’ and facilitators.

The author's interviews with Professors William Twining (29 April 1994), Robert Stevens (18 April 1994) and Michael Zander (22 November 1988).

The author's interviews with Professors Robert Stevens (18 April 1994) and Michael Zander (22 November 1988).

The author's interview with Peter Birks (13 July 1994), concerning his experience as a teaching assistant at Northwestern. Robert Stevens similarly did not much enjoy his experience as a teaching fellow at Northwestern, though he enjoyed the courses he audited; the author's interview with Professor Robert Stevens (Oxford, 18 April 1994).

The author's interviews with Professors J.A. Jolowicz (Trinity College, Cambridge, 6 December 1988) and Clive Schmitthoff (London, 1988).

Some of the many British faculty who taught at US law schools during the period under review include: W.W. Buckland (Cambridge), Stanley de Smith (LSE), P.B. Carter (Oxford), J. Hackney (Oxford), G.H. Treitel (Oxford), H.W.R. Wade (Oxford), J.K.B.M. Nicholas (Oxford), J.H.C. Morris (Oxford), Kurt Lipstein (Cambridge), Clive Schmitthoff (London), G.H. Jones (Cambridge), John Tiley (Cambridge), Tony Weir (Cambridge); Sir Peter North (Oxford); L.C.B. Gower (LSE), Otto Kahn-Freund (LSE). K.W. Wedderburn (LSE), and H.L.A. Hart (Oxford).

The author's interviews with Professors William Twining (29 April 1994) and Robert Stevens (18 April 1994).

On one individuals experience of teaching in Africa, and its impact on his notions of law and legal education, see Twining, Law in Context, p. 35 et seq.

See, for example, M. Loughlin (1993) The importance of elsewhere, Public Law Review, 4, p. 44; C. Harlow (1995) A special relationship? American influences on judicial review in England, in: I. Loveland (Ed.) A Special Relationship? American Influences on Public Law in the UK (Oxford, Clarendon Press), p. 79.

See, for example, S.P. Huntington (2004) Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York, Simon & Schuster).

The Remarks by President George W. Bush at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy 6 November 2003. http://www.ned.org/george-w-bush/remarks-by-president-george-w-bush-at-the-20th-anniversary.

The quotation is from Lawrence Durrell (1958) Mountolive (London, Faber), p. 89.

W.W. Fisher III, ‘Legal theory and legal education’, concludes that “a chastened version of the Harvard model still rules the waves” (p. 72). See, also, S. Bartie (2010) The lingering core of legal scholarship, Legal Studies, 30(3), pp. 345–369; R. Collier (2005) ‘We're all socio-legal Now?’ Legal education, scholarship and the ‘global knowledge economy’– reflections on the UK Experience, Sydney Law Review, 26, pp. 503–536; Kalman, Legal Realism at Yale 1927–1960; Schlegel, American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science; Hull, Roscoe Pound and Karl Llewellyn.

Gordon, ‘Modes of legal education and the social conditions that sustain them’, p. 9.

Schlegel, American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science.

J.W. Singer (1998) Review of Laura Kalman Legal Realism at Yale, 1927–1960, California Law Review, 76, p. 467.

D.P. Campbell (1990) If You Don't Know Where You're Going, You'll Probably End Up Somewhere Else (Allen, TX, Thomas More Association).