1. Star, L Julius Stone: An Intellectual Life (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992) p 100.Google Scholar

2. See the selection of essays in Irving, H, Mowbray, J and Walton, K (eds) Julius Stone: A Study in Influence (Annandale, NSW: Federation Press, 2010).Google Scholar

3. For a further discussion of some of the differences, see Bartie, S ‘The lingering core of legal scholarship’ (2010) 30 Legal Stud 345.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Robert Stevens' institutional history of the American law school published in 1983 (Stevens, R Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1859s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983)) was described by critics as ‘path breaking’ and the first of its kind:Google Scholar see Shreve, G ‘History of legal education’ (1983) 97 Harv L Rev 597 at 597;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Chase, A ‘Book review: Law School by Robert Stevens’ (1983) 67 Minn L Rev 893, 893;Google Scholar Swygert, M ‘Book review: Law School by Robert Stevens’(1985) XIV Stetson L Rev 339 at 341.Google Scholar Horwitz's critical history of American legal ideas, incorporating various scholarly movements, was published towards the very end of the twentieth century, in 1992: Horwitz, M The Transformation of American Law: 1870–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) pp ii–iii.Google Scholar While many American law school histories have been published over the years, they have generally been considered to lack critical depth and have tended to provide scant biographical details of legal scholars: see criticism in Konefsky, Af and Schlegel, Jh ‘Mirror mirror on the wall: histories of American law schools’ (1982) 95 Harv L Rev 833.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Jarvis, Rm ‘Law school histories: a panel discussion’ (2010) 32 Campbell L Rev 311 at 311.Google Scholar

5. This paper concentrates on two model histories of this kind: Duxbury, N Frederick Pollock and the English Juristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Lacey, N A Life of HLA Hart; The Nightmare and the Noble Dream (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).Google Scholar For an American example, see Schlegel, Jh American Realism and Empirical Social Sciences (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).Google Scholar

6. While legal scholars in areas such as jurisprudence, criminology and corporate law have studied the ideas of their predecessors, they have rarely extended their studies to consider the broader careers and context of the scholars (see criticism made by Schlegal, above n 6, pp 4–8).

7. In 2004, Fiona Cownie stated that the ‘history of legal education is a much-neglected subject, and as yet there is no comprehensive survey of the history of legal education in England’ (Cownie, F Legal Academics: Culture and Identity (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2004) p 39).Google Scholar To learn more about both the career and ideas of legal scholars, we are left with biographies, which for the most part only loosely acknowledge the importance of the work to the broader history of law schools, and jurisprudential works that provide an extended treatment of the scholar's ideas often divorced from their careers and lives. Examples of biographical works include Kimball, B The Inception of Modern Professional Education: CC Langdell, 1826–1906 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Summers, R Lon L Fuller (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984);Google Scholar Cosgrove, Ra The Rule of Law: Albert Venn Dicey, Victorian Jurist (London: Macmillan Press, 1980);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Prest, W William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Examples of jurisprudential analysis include Cosgrove, Ra Scholars of the Law: English Jurisprudence from Blackstone to Hart (New York: NYU Press, 1996)Google Scholar and Twining, W Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974).Google Scholar Duxbury has written a series of articles, along with a monograph considered in the second section of this paper, that combine biography, jurisprudence and a history of the trajectory of academic law: see eg Duxbury, N ‘In the twilight of Legal Realism: Fred Rodell and the limits to legal critique’ (1991) 11 Oxford J Legal Stud 354;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Duxbury, N ‘Jerome Frank and the legacy of Legal Realism’ (1991) 18 J L & Soc'y 175;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Duxbury, N ‘Some radicalism about realism – Thurman Arnold and the politics of modern jurisprudence’ (1990) 10 Oxford J Legal Stud 11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Richardson, W ‘British historiography of education in international context at the turn of the century, 1996–2006’ (2007) 36 Hist Educ 569 at 573.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Institutional histories have been written of most law schools in America, England and Australia. They are of a mixed quality. Some of the serious scholarly works include Waugh, J First Principles, The Melbourne Law School 1857–2007 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007);Google Scholar Lawson, Fh The Oxford Law School, 1850–1965 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968);Google Scholar Kalman, L Yale Law School and the Sixties (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).Google Scholar More recently, histories have been written of legal academic societies: see eg Cocks, R and Cownie, F A Great and Noble Occupation! The History of the Society of Legal Scholars (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2009).Google Scholar This section describes several institutional histories that develop theories about the institutional factors that have directed law schools and scholars. For another recent example, see Kimball, Ba ‘Impoverishing “the greatest law school in the world”: the financial collapse of Harvard Law School, 1895–1909’ (2011–2012) 61 J Legal Educ 5.Google Scholar

9. Sugarman, D ‘Is the reform of legal education hopeless? Or, seeing the hole instead of the doughnut’ (1985) 48 Modern L Rev 728 at 732.Google Scholar

10. Stevens, above n 5.

11. Stevens’ work was criticised for failing to give adequate treatment to the major scholar trends and figures: see Menkel-Meadow, C ‘Too little theory, too little practice? Stevens' law school’ (1985) 3 Am Bar Found'n Res J 675 at 684; Swygert, above n 5, at 343–344.Google Scholar

12. Tamanaha, Bz Failing Law Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Ibid, introduced at p xii.

14. Ibid, p 27.

15. Lancaster, J The Modernisation of Legal Education: A Critique of the Martin Bowen and Pearce Reports (Sydney: Centre for Legal Education, 1993) p 2.Google Scholar

16. Emphasised in James, N ‘Power-knowledge in Australian legal education: corporatism's reign’ (2004) 26 Sydney L Rev 587 at 596.Google Scholar

17. Lancaster, above n 16, p 5.

18. Ibid, p 2.

19. Ibid, p 1.

20. Ibid, p 4.

21. Ibid, p 47.

22. Pearce, D, Campbell, E and Harding, D Australian Law Schools: A Discipline Assessment for the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1987).Google Scholar

23. Lancaster, above n 16, p 56.

24. M Thornton Privatising the Public University: the Case of Law (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011) p xii.

25. Ibid, p xvi.

26. Ibid, p 110 (references omitted).

27. Ibid, p 111.

28. Ibid, p 113.

29. Ibid, p 113.

30. Ibid, p 114.

31. Cownie, above n 8, ch 6; Twining, W ‘Punching our weight? Legal scholarship and public understanding’ (2009) 29 Legal Stud 519.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32. In New Zealand, the profession has played a particularly domineering role in directing the curricula, suggesting that an institutional study would explain much in this regard: see Finn, J Educating for the Profession (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2010).Google Scholar

33. Feldman, M and Feinman, Jm ‘Legal education: its cause and cure’ (1984) 82 Mich L Rev 914 at 918–919.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34. While Thornton's work includes the findings from a qualitative study of legal academics, it does not capture the work and general endeavours of these academics, only their reading of the current environment. It is not a historical study of the work actually performed by legal academics.

35. Menkel-Meadow, above n 12, at 677; Sugarman, above n 10, at 731.

36. Twining, W Blackstone's Tower: The English Law School (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1994) p 24.Google Scholar

37. Ibid, p 24.

38. Pearce, above n 23, para 1.20.

39. Kuhn, Ts The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 3rd edn, 1996) p 19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40. Ibid.

41. EL Rubin ‘Law and the methodology of law’ (1997) Wis L Rev 521 at 526–527. Rubin acknowledges that Kuhn's vision challenged existing theories on how the natural sciences accumulate, but adds that Kuhn does not deny that over time ‘the area of scientific agreement increases’ (at 526–527).

42. Thanks must go to one of the anonymous reviewers, who suggested including this point.

43. In a review of Dubury, N's Patterns of American Jurisprudence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995),Google Scholar Schlegel suggested that the names of the major figures considered in this work could be swapped around without causing any distortion to Duxbury's central thesis: see Schlegel ‘Does Duncan Kennedy wear briefs or boxers?’ below n 60, at 299–300 and Schlegel ‘The ten thousand dollar question’ below n 60, at 457–464.

44. Twining, above n 8, pp x–xi, 204.

45. Ibid, p xii.

46. Ibid, pp 148, 217–219.

47. Twining argues that The Bramble Bush ‘can be read as an introduction to his juristic ideas, but because it is addressed specifically to first year law students it should not be taken as representative of his work as a scholar nor as a jurist in 1930, still less of the more mature later work’. Ibid, pp 128, 148, 152.

48. Ibid, p 113.

49. Of course, whether theory in the natural sciences accumulates in this way has also been challenged by sociologists of science. However, this has certainly been purported to be the case.

50. Indeed, Llewellyn believed that it would be dangerous for legal scholars to adopt the scientific tag and to suggest that the only topics worthy of study are those that are susceptible to rigorous quantification, or that would satisfy a criteria of objectivity. Twining, above n 8, p 196.

51. See eg Cedric Jones, T ‘Book review: Law in Society by Geoffrey Sawer’ (1966) 17 NI Legal Q 220.Google Scholar Indeed, the practice of writing book reviews and reviews and review essays has diminished considerably over the past 50 years.

52. Star, above n 2, p 93. In contrast, Stone's contemporary HLA Hart was critical of what he described as ‘books about books’ – in other words, jurisprudential writing that did not advance original thought: see Hart, Hla ‘Dias and Hughes on jurisprudence’ (1958) 4 J Soc'y Publ Teach L 144 Google Scholar and Sugarman, D ‘Hart interviewed: Hla Hart in conversation with David Sugarman’ (2005) 32 J L & Soc'y 267 at 281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53. See eg Chesterman and Weisbrot's account of Australian legal scholarship, where the work of legal scholars up until the 1980s is described as uncritical and positivist in nature: Chesterman, M and Weisbrot, D ‘Legal scholarship in Australia’ (1987) 50(6) Modern L Rev 709 at 710.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54. Thanks must once again go to one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting this point. For further discussion of the originality criteria in the context of English research assessment exercises, see Twining, above n 32, and Bartie, above n 4, at 350–351.

55. Schlegel has singled out works that offend against his preferred approach to intellectual histories. He names Rumble, We American Legal Realism: Skepticism, Reform, and the Judicial Process (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1969)Google Scholar and Purcell, E The Crisis of Democratic Theory: The Crisis of Democratic Theory (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), among others. See Schlegel, above n 6, pp 4–8.Google Scholar

56. Rubin, G and Sugarman, D Law, Economy and Society – Essays in the History of English Law (London, Professional Books, 1984) p 82,Google Scholar citing Kennedy, D ‘The structure of Blackstone's Commentaries’ (1979) 28 Buff L Rev 205 at 210, 220,Google Scholar and Vandevelde, KJ ‘The new property of the 19th century’ (1980) 29 Buff L Rev 325 at 327.Google Scholar

57. Thornton, above n 25, p x.

58. Ibid, pp x–xi.

59. See Schlegel, above n 6, pp 259–261; Schlegel, Jh ‘Does Duncan Kennedy wear briefs or boxers? Does Richard Posner ever sleep? Writing about jurisprudence, high culture and the history of intellectuals’ (1997) 45 Buff L Rev 277;Google Scholar JH Schlegel‘A life of Hla Hart’ (2006) Law & Hist Rev 679; JH Schlegel ‘Talkin' dirty: Twining's tower and Kalman's strange career’ (1997) Law & Soc Inquiry 981; Schlegel, Jh ‘The ten thousand dollar question’ (1989) 41 Stan L Rev 435;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Schlegel, Jh ‘Langdell's legacy or, the case of the empty envelope’ (1984) 36 Stan L Rev 1518.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

60. Taggart, M ‘Gardens or graveyards of scholarship? Festschriften in literature of the common law’ (2002) 22 Oxford J Legal Stud 245.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61. Ibid, at 245.

62. Sir L Street ‘Conference opening’ in Australian Law Council Foundation Legal Education in Australia (vol 1, 1976) p 4 (emphasis added).

63. The two models to be used in this part are Duxbury, above n 6, and Lacey, above n 6.

64. A landmark example of such a work is Kuhn, above n 40.

65. In one sense, broad histories of legal scholars can be a galvanising force, encouraging scholars to follow in the footsteps of critical legal scholars and to challenge existing arrangements. At the same time, the works offer something constructive and tangible to hold on to and do not represent a rejection of what has occurred in the past.

66. Lacey, above n 6.

67. See eg Schroeder, Jl ‘Beautiful dreamer: review of A Life of Hla Hart: the Nightmare and the Noble Dream ’ (2006) 77 U Colo L Rev 803 at 806–807, 836;Google Scholar Dyzenhaus, D ‘A life of Hla Hart: the nightmare and the noble dream’ (2005) 55 J Legal Ed 606, 606.Google Scholar

68. See eg White, Ge ‘Getting close to Hla Hart’ (2005) 29 Melbourne U L Rev 317;Google Scholar 330; Nagel, T ‘The central question’ (2005) 27 (3) Lond Rev Books 12, 12–13;Google Scholar Allan, J ‘Book review: A Life of Hla Hart: the Nightmare and the Noble Dream by Nicola Lacey’ (2006) 11 Otago L Rev 327, 327–328.Google Scholar

69. Schlegel was one of the few that recognised the broader potential: Schlegel, Jh ‘A life of Hla Hart’ (2006) Law & Hist Rev 679.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Schlegel, Jh ‘A life of Hla Hart’ (2006) Law & Hist Rev 679.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

70. For a recent account of the suspicion and lowly status traditionally attributed to legal biography, see Parry, Rg ‘Is legal biography really legal scholarship?’ (2010) 30(2) Legal Stud 208. Parry contends that biographies about judges and legal scholars (with specific reference to Lacey's Hart, at p 226, and Duxbury's Pollock, at p 218) have been belittled within the discipline of law.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

71. Duxbury, above n 6.

72. Lacey, above n 6, p 171.

73. Lacey, above n 6, p 219. Also quoted in Schlegel, above n 70, at 680.

74. Lacey, above n 6, p 92. In contrast, at 227 she explains Hart's process of thinking as working from first principles.

75. Schauer, F ‘(Re)taking Hart’ (2006) 119 Harv L Rev 852, 855–856.Google Scholar

76. Lacey, above n 6, p 157.

77. Ibid, p 157.

78. Ibid, pp 158–159, 262, 334. Even though Hart could be extremely gruelling in his sessions with doctoral students, his goodwill meant that ‘students almost always stayed the course and invariably looked back on the experience with gratitude’. Ibid, p 161.

79. Ibid, p 157.

80. Ibid, p 166. Lacey also mentions Hart's establishment of the influential Clarendon Law Series published by Oxford University Press, which produced short monographs unencumbered by footnotes.

81. Ibid, p 172.

82. ‘Herbert went to lengths well beyond what was due from his professional responsibility to smooth the path of his younger colleagues' career.’ Ibid, p 165.

83. Ibid, p 234.

84. Ibid, p 293.

85. Duxbury, above n 6, p 132, quoting from Soffer, Rn Discipline and Power: The University, History, and the Making of an English Elite, 1870–1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) 31.Google Scholar

86. Ibid, p 84.

87. Ibid, p 326.

88. Waddams, S ‘Book review: Frederick Pollock and the English juristic tradition’ (2005) 55 U Toronto L J 1023, 1025.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

89. See Bartie, S ‘A full day's work: a study of Australia's first legal scholarly community’ (2010) 29 U Queensland L J 67, 76–96.Google Scholar

90. D Derham ‘Report on overseas leave’ (1954) Melbourne U Gazette 55.

91. Bartie, above n 90, 90–93.

92. For a lengthier account of Brown's life and works, see the intellectual histories of Michael Roe and the personal biography of Brown published by his son Cyril: Roe, M Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought 1890–1960 (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1984) (‘Vitalism’);Google Scholar M Roe ‘William Jethro Brown’ (paper presented at the Inaugural lecture, Hobart, University of Tasmania, 27 April 1977); Brown, Cma William Jethro Brown; A Personal Biography and Bibliography (Perth, 1983).Google Scholar While each provides a fascinating account of Brown, none of the works consider his endeavours in the context of the trajectory of Australian academic law. Roe's work concentrates instead on how Brown and other intellectuals of the time ‘felt, enhanced and transmitted Vitalism [and] echoed various reform movements throughout the world, but who were especially aligned with American progressivism as voiced by Theodore Roosevelt.’ Roe, Vitalism, p 1.

93. See Irving, above n 3.

94. For a recent example, see Twining, W and Miers, D How to Do Things with Rules (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 252.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

95. Waugh, above n 9, pp 104–105.

96. Cownie, above n 7, p 135.

97. Ibid, p 205.

98. Ibid.