Taking the culture of scholarship seriously?

Editorial by Julian Webb (UKCLE Director) from the Spring 2007 issue of Directions looking at socio-legal research capacity in UK law schools.

Two recent publications have highlighted a significant loss of socio-legal research capacity within UK law schools. The final report of the Nuffield Inquiry on Empirical Research in Law (Genn, Partington & Wheeler, 2006) paints a bleak picture of an ageing population of empirical socio-legal researchers, and of undergraduate and postgraduate curricula that do too little to introduce new generations of students to the contribution, both intellectual and methodological, of empirical legal research. Similarly, Michael Adler, another distinguished socio-legal scholar, has recently documented the declining performance of socio-legal studies in the Economic and Social Research Council’s 2005 Recognition exercise for postgraduate training. As Adler (2007) observes, in 2005 applications for recognition in socio-legal studies achieved a success rate of only 33%, well below that recorded by criminology and most other disciplines.

This picture stands in rather stark contrast to the more upbeat claims of scholars such as Twining (1995) and Cownie (2004) concerning the integration and normalisation of socio-legal approaches within the legal academy – though such claims of course relate as much, if not more, to the reception of socio-legal theory as opposed to empirical legal scholarship per se. The Nuffield Inquiry (2006: 29-33) points to a variety of causes for the decline of the latter – for example, the continuing influence of professional demands on the curriculum, the relatively heavy teaching loads in many law schools (though this claim is not entirely supported by recent data), structural difficulties in accommodating the time for empirical legal research, the existing culture of legal scholarship, which undervalues the collaborative work often required by large scale empirical research, and the lack of a critical mass of empirical research experience in many law schools. It is also tempting to ask to what extent both the more theoretical turn in interdisciplinary legal scholarship and the common perception that policy orientated empirical research may be problematic in terms of submission to the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) have also been important – and possibly linked – factors in the story.

So what of the solution?

The Nuffield Inquiry and Adler reports focus primarily on a range of recommendations to enhance postgraduate training, to increase the critical mass of socio-legal researchers and to increase collaboration between legal scholars and social scientists. However, the Nuffield report offers perhaps surprisingly few concrete recommendations as regards the undergraduate stage of legal education. It recognises a need to develop more effective socio-legal course materials, and proposes that means should be found for funding research leave to create these. It also recommends developing summer schools for undergraduates interested in developing methodological skills. These are useful and welcome suggestions in themselves, but the report arguably fails to embed such developments in any overarching vision of the role of (socio-legal) scholarship in the law school, or of its relationship to learning and teaching.

We should not only take the Nuffield agenda seriously, we should use it as an opportunity to revisit the scholarly aspirations of the law school. As Ernest Boyer, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has argued, an overarching ‘culture of scholarship’ does matter. Boyer suggests that there are five realms of scholarship, all of which are critical and necessary to the health of the academy. These he terms the scholarship of discovery, of integration, of application, of teaching, and, lastly, of engagement.

The scholarship of discovery describes the form of scholarship generally equated with the term ‘research’ – the basic creation, formulation and codification of (legal) knowledge. The scholarship of integration acknowledges the extent to which, in an increasingly complex world, conventional discipline based ‘discovery’ scholarship struggles to answer the question “what does it mean”. It recognises that inter- and trans-disciplinary knowledge and teamwork is often necessary to synthesise and evaluate knowledge in a way that gives it meaning in ‘real world’ situations. The scholarship of application refers to what we now commonly call applied research and knowledge transfer. The scholarship of teaching embraces the development of creative and original modes of delivery and the effective evaluation of teaching and learning – in other words it treats teaching as deserving of the same rigour as other areas of scholarship (see my previous editorial, The future for legal education research). The scholarship of engagement recognises also that scholarly work has a transformative capacity, by using the resources of the university collaboratively with local or other communities to address social, economic, legal and ethical problems within that community.

Boyer’s vision not only helps broaden our appreciation of the range of scholarship – and the centrality of socio-legal and empirical perspectives to at least some of these forms – it also emphasises the relationship between research and teaching, particularly at the undergraduate stage, where student engagement with research is likely to be least profound and yet most needed for the future of our discipline.

Engaging students with discovery scholarship demonstrates that knowledge is dynamic and also contingent, and that learning is an expansive experience. Research-led teaching in this sense itself encourages students to view learning as a lifelong process. Exposure to a scholarship of integration similarly has the capacity to broaden students’ intellectual horizons. A scholarship of integration and application can be developed through problem-based approaches to the curriculum, which oblige students to look (and think) outside the traditional curricula boxes – they encourage creative thought and new perspectives on legal phenomena. Properly integrated into the curriculum, activities such as innocence projects, death row internships and a whole range of community advocacy and ‘street law’ projects can involve students directly (alone or collaboratively with tutors) in a scholarship of engagement. As the work of bodies such as the new Reinvention Centre (the CETL for undergraduate research) show, the potential for such activities to embed research-based learning experientially into the curriculum is enormous, with positive consequences both for student motivation and academic research.

Rethinking the culture of scholarship of course creates some significant challenges of its own, and not least to the inherent conservatism of the academy. It would require us to look for ways to redesign infrastructure to support a range of scholarship and embed it more explicitly in the day to day practices of the law school. It could involve some, perhaps quite radical, rethinking of curricula – though there is nothing in Boyer’s vision that is not already being done somewhere. But the potential rewards include a worthwhile narrowing of the gap between teaching and research, and the opportunity to bring greater substance to the claim that we are all socio-legal now.

References

• Adler M (2007) Recognising the problem: socio-legal research training in the UK Edinburgh: The University School of Social and Political Studies (download from the Nuffield Inquiry website)
• Boyer E (1990) Scholarship reconsidered: priorities of the professoriate Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation
• Boyer E (1996) ‘The scholarship of engagement’ Journal of Public Service Outreach 1:11-20
• Cownie F (2004) Legal academics: culture and identities Oxford: Hart
• Genn H, Partington, M & Wheeler S (2006) Law in the real world: improving our understanding of how law works London: Nuffield Foundation (download from the Nuffield Inquiry website)
• Twining W (1995) ‘Remembering 1972: the Oxford Centre in the context of developments in higher education and the discipline of law’ Journal of Law & Society 22:35-49

Last Modified: 4 June 2010