I shall not attempt to give more than the briefest summary of the founding of the Society, for the story has already been ably told by someone with first-hand knowledge, namely, A. D. Bowers, Emeritus Member, Extraordinary, of the Society, whose account appears in the June 1959 issue of the Journal. It is not clear whether the originator of the idea of the Society's foundation was Edward Jenks, then Principal and Director of Legal Studies to The Law Society and later first holder of the Chair of English Law at the London School of Economics, or Henry Goudy, Regius Professor of the University of Oxford. What is clear, however, is that Jenks was the one who really got things moving. Indeed in the early days the Society was apparently sometimes referred to as ‘Jenks’ Trade Union’, to Jenks’ disgust.

In terms of the history of the social sciences, the latter quarter of the nineteenth century was characterised in no uncertain manner by neo-Kantianism. The revival in question was aimed at rehabilitating the Kantian concept of science as a system, unified essentially by the idea of a system rather than by any more realistic or historical classification of its subject matter. The most notable and far-reaching effects of this revival were to be the constitution of the sciences of linguistics and of law. In both cases the major portion of the nineteenth century had been dominated by attacks upon the received orthodoxies of universal grammar and of exegetical legal studies, respectively, and their displacement by the uncertainties of creationist and historical methodologies.

In 1908 international law governed relations between ‘civilised states’ only. It applied exclusively to those states within the Family ofNations - 45 fully sovereign states according to the first edition of Oppenheim's International Law. These 45 included the six ‘Great Powers’, Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Russia, various lesser European states, the United States of America and 20 Latin American states. In Africa ‘The Negro Republic of Liberia and the Congo Free State were the only real and full members ofthe Family of Nations’, in Asia only Japan. The position ofsuch states as Persia, Siam, China, Korea and Abyssinia was doubtful; ‘These states are certainly civilised states, and Abyssinia is even a Christian state.

In the 75 years since the Society of Public Teachers of Law came into being there has been a revolution in the conduct of business operations. Methods of transport have been transformed; commercial transactions have increased vastly in size, in number and in complexity; a whole range of new contract structures and financing techniques has evolved; and the receipt, storage and transmission of information and instructions have been completely changed by new technology.

If it be right that commercial law is rooted in the customs and practices of merchants we could reasonably expect to find a parallel transformation in English commercial law, a reappraisal of fundamental concepts, a wholesale jettisoning of nineteenth century statutes and case law. It is a matter for some astonishment that this has not occurred.

It was not within the terms of reference of the Royal Commission on Legal Services to bring under review either procedure or the administration of justice. Nevertheless, the Commission received so much evidence on these subjects that it saw fit to publish a summary of that evidence and to recommend that ‘a full appraisal of procedure and the operation in practice of our system of justice, in particular in all civil courts’ should be carried out. Since then, the Committee on Procedure and Practice in the Chancery Division has reported, its recommendations have been largely implemented, and numerous changes of practice in the High Court and the Court of Appeal have been introduced by rule of court and practice direction.

There is no agreed definition of socio-legal studies: some use the term broadly to cover the study of law in its social context, but I prefer to use it to refer to the study of the law and legal institutions from the perspectives of the social sciences (viz all the social sciences – not only sociology). The last decade has seen many developments in this enterprise. Many younger academic lawyers became dissatisfied with the traditional type of legal scholarship, which concentrated on the internal consistency of the law and the inter-relationship of different legal rules. They showed great interest in studying the realities of the law in action, the social effects of law and the relationship of law to wider questions of social structure, and naturally turned to the social sciences for assistance.