I had at the start to decide upon a generic term for the new universities – they will not be new for ever. None of the various caps so far tried have fitted. ‘Greenfields’ describes only a transient phase. ‘Whitebrick’, ‘Whitestone’, and ‘Pinktile’ hardly conjure up the grey or biscuit concrete massiveness of most of their buildings, and certainly not the black towers of Essex. ‘Newbridge’ is fine as far as the novelty goes, but where on earth are the bridges? Sir Edward Boyle more felicitously suggested ‘Shakespeare’. But I have chosen to call them the Plateglass Universities. It is architecturally evocative; but more important, it is metaphorically accurate.
Take a Valium. Have a party. Go on a demo. Shoot a soldier. Make a bang. Bed a friend. That’s your problem-solving system … But haven’t we tried all that?
I hate that phrase ‘the real world.’ Why is an aircraft factory more real than a university? Is it?
Flashback: Geoffrey Wilson
I started in Belfast on the first of January 1966. Shortly after that I encountered Geoffrey Wilson, first in print and then in September at a conference on ‘The Concept of a Law Degree’ in Cambridge at which we immediately became allies and friends. At that event, Patrick McAuslan (ex-Dar, then at LSE, soon to be at Warwick) presented a sharply critical paper on the relationship between legal education and training in England. This was the first conference of the Young Members’ Group (YMG) of the Society of Public Teachers’ of Law (SPTL) which had been started by Tony Bradley of Trinity Hall, Cambridge – a future Dar es Salaamite.4 For most of the next seven years or so Geoffrey Wilson was a key figure in my professional life and it was largely because of him that I moved to Warwick in 1972.
Wilson’s 1966 article contained the following passage:
The time is ripe for a consideration of the part played by the law and lawyers in society and the influence that the developments in the social sciences and the increased interest in the social relations of law are having, or should have, on the administration of the law, the nature and scope of the lawyer’s expertise and the scope of legal studies generally. Old views of the lawyer’s role, of the proper location of the borders between judicial and legislative processes, between the courts and other dispute-settling procedures, between law and the social sciences are in the melting-pot. What is missing is a vigorous philosophy of law that will tie together the leading influences and motives behind the new developments and at the same time point the way to the future. In the United Kingdom in particular the opportunity is at last at hand to destroy once and for all the image of the English lawyer, academic as well as practitioner, as a rule-dominated conceptualist. One firm thrust and the dominance which the analytical positivists have enjoyed over the lawyer’s view of his role and the scope of legal studies can be destroyed forever.5
Geoffrey read a draft of ‘Pericles and the Plumber’, my inaugural lecture at Queen’s, which I delivered in January 1967.6 This was very different in style from his polemic, but moving in the same direction. One difference between our pieces was that, although stimulated by American ideas, Geoffrey did not explicitly mention them to a Cambridge audience; whereas my lecture focused on what we might learn from the United States, but discreetly did not suggest that the UK could also learn from Dar es Salaam. Geoffrey’s 1966 statement (he published several more) had some other nuanced differences. He was reacting against the specifically Cambridge version of doctrinalism and against the attitudes and pretensions of the English Bar as he perceived them. His main complaint was that the legal profession and its culture were out of touch with the realities of English society. He implied that legal education was narrow, rule-bound, insular, and unrealistic. In a later piece he compared the phrase ‘English legal scholarship’ to a ‘disposable plastic cup … Each adjective strengthens the message that one cannot expect much in terms of quality or long-term utility from it.’7
Geoffrey and I had overlapping, but significantly different backgrounds. He was four years older; his father had been a regular soldier, and he had moved through many schools as an Army child, before settling down and doing well at Peter Symonds’ Grammar School in Winchester. From there he won an exhibition to Queens’ College, Cambridge. After National Service, he went up to Cambridge in 1949. Both of us had wanted to read History, but read Law instead. Our motives were different. I bowed to parental pressure. According to one of his sons, conscious of his modest social background, Geoffrey chose Law because he felt that it would provide a more level playing field on which to compete with upper class ‘peers’. He was soon recognised as an outstanding student. After a string of Firsts and prizes, he was immediately elected to a Research Fellowship at Queens’ followed by a full Fellowship and University Lectureship in 1955.
Geoffrey spent a year at Yale and Berkeley in 1960–1, but our first experiences of the USA had been rather different: he was not a student there, he specialised in Constitutional Law, and he had a mixed reaction to American legal education. The cultures of Chicago and Yale law schools were not the same: Chicago was oriented towards leading Chicago and Wall Street Law Firms and economics and business; as I learned in 1965, Yale looked more towards Washington DC, the softer social sciences and public policy.
As a person, Geoffrey was highly intelligent, interested in music, fine art, ritual and bargain hunting. His home was like an untidy museum. He exhibited a striking mix of charm, scepticism and penetrating observation. My most vivid memory was that he asked good questions, especially in job interviews and in seminars, where his probing could be devastating. Some found him quite abrasive. I soon realised, that despite his polemical attacks on its approach to Law, he really loved Cambridge, including the rituals and privileges and – for him – a laid-back atmosphere. He wrote well, but only bothered to publish when he felt there was a good reason. Except for a quietly subversive casebook on Constitutional and Administrative Law, by 1966 he had not published much and was not under pressure to do so.8 He loved teaching and was popular among undergraduates: he distributed doughnuts in lectures, lent prints to Queens’ students and played a full role in College life.
About a year after we first met, Geoffrey was appointed to the Founding Chair of Law at the University of Warwick with a clear mandate to innovate. During the next phase we had many discussions about his plans. I have vivid memories of long walks in the Mountains of Mourne and a quite extensive correspondence. I could not join Warwick at the start as there was only one Chair. Anyway, Queen’s had treated me generously, so I felt that I could hardly leave so soon after arriving. However, two of Geoffrey’s original team, Patrick McAuslan and Sol Picciotto, were ex-Dar es Salaam, and so in the early years Geoffrey had to listen to a lot of ‘In Dar es Salaam we … ’.
It is difficult to assess how much Geoffrey and I influenced one another at this stage. We bounced ideas off each other and let our imaginations fly. I had had the experience of founding a new law school. We had different interpretations of American law school culture and American Legal Realism. He was strongly committed to undergraduate teaching, while I was already becoming more interested in postgraduate courses. I almost certainly tried, but failed, to persuade him of the advantages of a four-year honours degree, such as those at Queen’s and Edinburgh. In those days such degrees attracted mandatory grants. The Warwick story might have been very different if I had succeeded on this issue.9
Geoffrey was just one of a number of British academic lawyers of our generation who rebelled against their initial legal education and sought to develop alternatives. His contribution was unique in that he seized the opportunity to establish a radically different law school in an innovative environment and to implement an exceptionally coherent view of what that institution should be. Appointed to Warwick two years after the university was founded, he had almost three years in which to develop an ethos, design a path-breaking undergraduate curriculum and recruit a lively team of like-minded younger colleagues from several countries.
In the early years Warwick was clearly ‘Wilson’s Law School’. It is known today for having pioneered a ‘law in context’ approach. Geoffrey’s vision was more specific. The key ingredients were starting with real-life social and political problems rather than formal legal rules; freeing legal studies from insularity by emphasising foreign, European Community and international law, thereby anticipating concerns with ‘globalisation’; and arguing that the discipline of law can offer distinctive lenses for understanding society. He insisted that Warwick was a Law school, not a cross-disciplinary ‘cafeteria of Sunday supplement law’. Although cautious about collaboration with social scientists (he preferred ‘two disciplines in one head’), he played a major role nationally in developing socio-legal studies in the UK.
Geoffrey’s most striking and important departure was the initial undergraduate curriculum at Warwick. This emphasised transnational law and included several subjects not then normally studied by undergraduates. Some were classified by socially relevant categories rather than legal concepts: Housing, Planning, Companies, Labour Relations, Finance and Taxation, Family, Welfare, and Consumer Law.10 When challenged about the number of compulsory subjects, his standard riposte was: ‘How can anyone understand a capitalist society without having studied both Labour Law and Company Law?’11 ‘Anyone’ included non-lawyers.
Geoffrey’s and my ideas and approach were very similar. Rather than the vague rubric ‘law in context’, the early Warwick mantra was ‘broadening the study of law from within’ to which he gave a quite specific meaning. However, there were some differences, which in time became more pronounced. He considered himself to be reacting against rule-dominated positivism and the culture of the legal establishment; my central concern was the relationship between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. I had not entirely rejected ‘positivism’ in a fairly narrow sense. I still believed that it is often useful to distinguish law as it is from law as it ought to be and that conceptual analysis is important. Geoffrey leaned towards Roscoe Pound’s sociological jurisprudence; my approach was more Llewellynesque – more particularistic, less schematic. Geoffrey favoured studying foreign legal systems on their own terms rather than from a comparative perspective; his focus was on Europe; mine was still on East Africa and, more generally, the Global South. I was prepared to concentrate on English laws and institutions in their own historical, social and political contexts; he was mostly concerned to study contemporary local social and political problems from essentially a Fabian point of view. At the time I found British political attitudes about Left and Right quite parochial and insular, and was more concerned with North–South relations, colonialism, neocolonialism, ‘development’ and diffusion of law. Geoffrey considered himself to be both a public lawyer and an endlessly inquisitive, sometimes quirky, intellectual. He was often quite dismissive of ‘theory’ and of Jurisprudence (which was quite weak at Cambridge); I considered myself to be a theorist with some expertise in private law. These were mainly differences of emphasis, but there were also quite strong contrasts of personality. Nevertheless, we got on quite amicably until he abruptly stepped down from the Chairmanship and, reluctantly, I had to take over.
In 1973, already separated from his first wife, Geoffrey took up with a beautiful and intelligent younger woman. By then, such relationships were generally accepted – A. B. Weston’s adventures in Dar had been much more spectacular. Unfortunately, Marcia was the current wife of a junior colleague and that was considered scandalous, not least by the partners of younger staff. My memory of the details is a blur. Geoffrey took leave of absence in February 1973, but did not officially resign the Chairmanship until 1974. Happily, the marriage was a success; they produced three talented sons and a close-knit, almost self-sufficient family. Geoffrey exchanged the role of paterfamilias of a lively group of younger colleagues to actual, engaged fatherhood. He stayed on at Warwick as Professor until he retired in 1997, but after 1973 played an increasingly marginal role in the development of the Law School.
Reluctant Chairman
I found myself holding the fort in an unsettled period, not only related to Geoffrey’s personal life. At national level in 1973–4 there were major strikes, the fall-out from Bloody Sunday, increased IRA bombs, two General Elections, inflation, a recession, the three-day week, entry to the EEC, the oil crisis, apartheid, the Cold War and much else besides. Almost the only good news was that Warwick’s most famous alumnus, Steve Heighway, scored for Liverpool when they won the 1974 FA Cup Final. Things were hardly less turbulent in Warwick University; there were hangovers from earlier troubles on campus12 and some uncomfortable divisions within the Department.
Having to take over from Geoffrey at short notice was extremely inconvenient. I had just settled into my project on Evidence and had applied for a major research grant. I felt that I had done enough administration in Dar and Belfast. I was Acting Chair, then Chair of the Law School from February 1973 to September 1975 and again through 1977–8, a total of about thirty months. My friend and ally, Patrick McAuslan, took over from me in the interim on the understanding that I would serve another year on my return. During 1975–7 I was away from Warwick because I managed to get a major research grant for my work on Evidence and spent an academic year as a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College Oxford, followed by visiting appointments at the University of Virginia and Northwestern University Law School.
Much of my energy as Chairman was devoted to keeping the Law School running, though not always smoothly, recruiting staff, fighting our corner at University level in a time of cuts and maintaining good public relations. On the whole the teaching went well, research less so. Some of my younger colleagues were more interested in micro-politics than serious research: there was even a suggestion that research and publication were ‘careerist’, an idea quite contrary to the University’s and my own ethos. On the other hand, they were enthusiastic teachers and, I think, for students it was a very good time to be at Warwick.
Some saw committee work as a source of power, until I renamed all administrative tasks as ‘chores’ – perhaps my greatest achievement. That worked for most administration, except appointments, the most hotly contested sphere in my time. Formally, the appointments process was centralised at University level, usually with the Chairman and one other colleague serving on the Appointments Committee for lectureships and above. However, the Law School set up its own unofficial elected appointments committee, which drew up a long-list, interviewed candidates, and then sent a brief short-list up to the centre. This provided an opportunity for hotly contested elections, intrigue, cabals and an arena for debating conflicting views. It survived unnoticed by the University until a candidate sent a claim for travel expenses to the Registrar of the University rather than to the Law School, who used the visiting speakers’ fund. The University declared the departmental appointments committee unconstitutional, but our committee still continued to operate underground for a time.
Later I used this as a fable to illustrate the idea of interposed norms – our elections were more ‘real’ than the University’s Charter and Statutes, which were ‘surface law’.13 However, the power of the illegal body was also fictitious, for it soon became clear to me that for many colleagues their sense of power came from conducting interviews rather than influencing outcomes – so that after a day of subjecting candidates to tough questioning, the interviewers often failed to report on the interview. When the Chairman attended the University Committee, he treated the Law School’s informal committee as purely advisory and not very forthcoming with its advice.
Soon after I took over as Chairman, I agreed to a demand from younger colleagues to hold a discussion on revising the curriculum. The proposal was made in terms of student choice, but they clearly also wanted to innovate. The outcome was that some of Wilson’s preferred courses were made optional and some new ones were introduced. In my view this was inevitable because of the expansion of the School and colleagues wishing to design their own courses. However, I had the strong impression that Geoffrey blamed me for diluting his coherent vision of an undergraduate degree. I agree that something important was lost, but with an expanding institution such a specific ethos and limited curriculum were unsustainable. There would have been much less of a problem if we had had a four-year LLB. I would have been able to make the case for keeping Company and Labour Law compulsory and having some advanced options as well.
However, we did to some extent retain some fact-based classification of subjects – that is, that some traditional courses were redistributed on the basis of a non-legal or social rather than a legal category; for example, Land Use and Housing Law and Housing Finance for Property, or Evidence and Proof for the Law of Evidence.14 This raised questions about the recognition of the Warwick LLB for exemption from Part I of the Bar and Solicitors’ examinations.15 In dealing with the legal professions I chose diplomacy rather than confrontation. The first problem was that we did not have a course called ‘Torts’ – ‘torticles’ had been distributed among Civil Liberties (defamation), Land and Housing (trespass and nuisance) and Company Law (economic torts), Evidence and Proof (law of evidence) and a course on accidents.16 Nor did we have a course on Equity and Trusts. Over a bottle of Claret I negotiated a deal with Robert Goff QC (later Lord Goff), whose lectures on defamation I had attended at Oxford.17 He was representing both barristers and solicitors. He made it clear that he was not concerned with the quality of the Warwick degree, but rather with closer supervision of the then emerging polytechnic law schools. We both realised that this business of recognition of first degrees in Law was a charade – illustrated by the fact that, so far as I can tell, no proposal for a single honours degree in Law was ever rejected in the post-Ormrod period. Only mixed degrees (like Law and Politics) caused problems. Nevertheless, a great many academic lawyers experienced unnecessary angst or unwarranted idleness (no new courses) because of this requirement. Later recognition of degrees became a major political issue as the number of core subjects was quietly expanded. That conflict continues in 2017 with the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority trying to impose what is in practice a pre-Warwick regime.18
This is not the place to try to reconstruct the early history of the Warwick Law School, which is attracting the attention of several legal historians. Here I shall confine attention to two topics: ‘Warwickisation’ (rethinkings of traditional fields), and some of my external activities during this period. ‘Law in context’ and ‘R/realism’ as ideas are dealt with in Chapter 13.
Rethinkings
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Warwick for me was the injunction to every member of academic staff to rethink their subject in a broader way. This applied first to teaching and then more generally to research and scholarship. As Editor of the Law in Context series over time I recruited more than a dozen Warwick authors, including some who never completed their projects. Ten produced excellent books.19 Three of them, Patrick Atiyah, Patrick McAuslan and Michael Chesterman, deserve attention here; in Chapter 14 I shall give an account of my own efforts to broaden the study of Evidence in Law.
Some years ago, I entered ‘rethinking’ as a keyword in the University of Miami Law Library catalogue and it came up with 138 books, of which 100 or so had the actual word in the title. The great majority of these had been published in the previous twenty years. There were, of course, many more articles. Any scholarly enquiry requires some rethinking, but these referred mainly to whole sub-disciplines, such as International Law or Comparative Law, or less extensive, but substantial, subjects such as Evidence or Negligence. Many of the titles implicitly promised a more or less radical approach. Such large-scale rethinkings can be responses to dissatisfaction with traditional or settled ways of thought or to perceived challenges from changing circumstances, as with ‘globalisation’, or to self-criticism or more complex combinations of factors. The titles often carry a suggestion of self-promotion.
It is worth examining some examples of specific rethinkings that I have experienced at close quarters which are directly relevant to the themes of this book. I have already described how Hart introduced ‘the revolution in philosophy’ into Jurisprudence. In Chicago, experience of an American law school brought to light some fundamental aspects of my dissatisfaction with my English legal education; in Khartoum, and more explicitly in Dar es Salaam, in the radically different contexts of two newly independent countries we had to reconsider almost everything we had learned about law. I will deal later with my thoughts about how globalisation challenges settled assumptions about particular topics and about Western traditions of academic law in general (Chapter 18) and I have illustrated some culture shocks. But there is something special about the programmatic approach adopted at Warwick, as illustrated by the work of these three colleagues.
Patrick Atiyah
The first in time was a book by Patrick Atiyah, who had been my colleague in Khartoum and was the first person I invited to contribute to the Law in Context series. I asked him to do a book on regulation or commercial law in practice; however, he said that he was bored with contract and commerce. He wanted to do a number on Torts. Remembering my ‘betrayal’ by Salmond, I accepted immediately. Within a relatively short time Patrick produced a book, Accidents, Compensation and the Law (1970),20 that met all my complaints about Salmond. He critically analysed the common law action for negligence in the context of a total picture of accidents in society and an overview of different kinds of compensation system. Focusing mainly on negligence, he dealt with insurance, settlement out of court, the unpredictability of damage awards (he later wrote a book on The Damages Lottery)21 – in short, all of the major omissions from Salmond. He demonstrated the incoherence and inconsistencies both within the Torts regime and in relation to other compensation regimes such as private insurance, criminal injuries compensation and social security benefits – so-called ‘systems’ based on different, often confused ideologies. The book was a highly critical account of the existing Torts regime in both design and practical operation and made quite radical proposals for reform. Nearly fifty years later the book is in its eighth edition (2013). Atiyah’s proposals have not been implemented and, because (rather than in spite) of that, generations of students (by no means all) have been saved from the account of negligence that misled me as a student. This marvellous book did not replace the doctrinal texts, but placed them in a radically different framework and most later books have since acknowledged the relevance at least of these other factors.22 Accidents, Compensation and the Law was published before I recruited Patrick to Warwick in 1973. There he devoted himself to a contextual history of contract, The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract (1979), which he had nearly completed before he moved to the Chair of English Law at Oxford in 1977.
Atiyah’s method is interesting in contrast to traditional Torts textbooks. First, his standpoint was of a mildly Fabian legal scholar talking about the Torts system in general, rather than expounding its rules in detail. Secondly, it was critical, with a clear sense of underlying political values and rationales. Thirdly, it was concerned with the actual operation of the relevant law; fourthly, it substituted ‘compensation for accidents’ (not a doctrinal concept) for ‘Torts’ and ‘Negligence’ as the organising concept and this provided a basis for comparing different compensation regimes and showing up the injustices, incoherence and anomalies of the situation. Fifthly, he explained the situation largely in terms of a history of piecemeal growth without any coherent guiding principles or ideology. Finally, the book is explicitly addressed to law students to help them to understand the existing system; the explicit critique and recommendations were largely confined to a relatively short last chapter. Brilliantly edited and updated by Peter Cane since 1987, for me this is a model of excellence for a ‘contextual’ work. There is no ideal type for such works, but anyone wanting to rethink a doctrinal field can learn a great deal from it.23
The McAuslan legend
Patrick McAuslan and I were two of the three co-founders of the Law Faculty in Dar; we had jointly drafted the entry on Law in the prospectus for schools (Chapter 5); I think of that as the first ‘law in context’ manifesto; Patrick was also a founder member of Warwick Law School; he had arrived before me and had already occupied Land Law and Planning; Evidence was my second choice to Land; it is a good thing that Patrick got there first because he did a much better job than I could have done; he pioneered two highly original courses and later on became a leading consultant on land reform and urban planning in forty-two countries (his estimate), mainly in the Global South.24
Rather than try to describe how Patrick actually constructed his pioneering courses on Land Law and Land Use Planning, I have tried to reconstruct his approach as an ideal type. I have called this ‘the McAuslan legend’.25 The approach goes something like this. The first step is, like Atiyah, to choose a suitable organising category, preferably fact-based,26 that is directly related to some social phenomenon or socio-political set of problems: for example, land or land use rather than Real Property, or Property or some other abstract legal concept. The second step is to construct a total picture of the social phenomena involved. In my version Patrick takes out a map of England and Wales and asks how much land is there and what are the main uses to which it is put? How are these distributed statistically and geographically (demographic realism)? Land use can be roughly categorised as industrial and commercial, agriculture, housing, transport, amenity (including sport), security (including the armed services), governance and administration. With regard to each use ask: Who are the main actors and legal persons affected? What are the main institutions and transactions involved in each type of land use? What gives rise to disputes? And so on. The third step is to acknowledge that though this construction of a total picture of land and its uses sets a broad context, it immediately reveals that for the purposes of designing a course or a student work, quite difficult selection is necessary.
Patrick decided to focus on two categories, one traditional (housing) and one almost completely undeveloped in legal education in UK at the time (problems of land use planning).27 The choice of these two topics from a much wider field could be justified by their social importance, their interest, their practical value for intending practitioners and their link with tradition. Conventional Real Property courses focused very largely on housing, the ‘house’ typically a mansion called Blackacre, with a butler, footmen and six maids’ bedrooms in attics upstairs. Warwick students would be expected to be familiar with the basic concepts, principles, rules and transactions of property law; housing is a good vehicle for studying these in context.
In this instance there is still room for some more demographic realism; for example, where are the houses and where are the people? The answers to these questions revealed some significant gaps in traditional treatments, in which almost no mention was made of the homeless, squatters, travellers (‘gypsies’) and council house tenants who, before Mrs Thatcher’s reforms, constituted over 50 per cent of occupiers in England and Wales. No wonder that in the late 1960s there was felt to be something ‘unreal’ about Blackacre – like Downton Abbey without the downstairs. Each of these categories is associated with complex problems and legal responses, involving many fields of law – for instance, issues of discrimination in relation to public housing, which had been the tinder for reigniting the Troubles in Northern Ireland.28
Once again, this approach shows up the complexity of problems, the intermingling of different fields of law and acute issues of selection. Patrick had the luxury of two full compulsory courses spread over two years and he still had to make some hard choices about focus and educational objectives. Someone adopting exactly the same approach could have come up with a very different design for their course or a contextual book.29
Michael Chesterman
Michael Chesterman, an outstanding Australian lawyer, contributed two books to the Law in Context series. The first, Charities, Trusts and Social Welfare, was an excellent social history of charity law; the second, now in its fifth edition with new editors, has become one of the most respected student books on Trusts, while maintaining a contextual approach with a commercial focus.30 His standpoint and approach were different in each book, and different again from those of Atiyah and McAuslan.
These three examples show how flexible, yet related, contextual approaches can be and how they can be accepted as both scholarly and innovative at the same time. I shall deal in the next chapter with the meanings of ‘law in context’ and its relationship to R/realism and in Chapter 14 with my own attempts to rethink Evidence.
Outside Work
Nearly all academic lawyers undertake work beyond their formal duties.31 A few are paid, most do a lot pro bono or for nominal amounts, as with external examining. During the 1970s I continued to serve as an external examiner in Africa and in English polytechnics, mainly to support these institutions. It was also a good way of networking and keeping plugged in to the gossip circuit. At various times I was involved locally in extra-mural teaching in Coventry, the Warwick District Community Relations Council (Chairman for two years), as the one agnostic on the Bishop of Coventry’s Council for Social Responsibility (the most intellectual of these pursuits) and in various legal education and publishing activities, including a few consultancies. I attended conferences, was particularly active in the Society of Public Teachers of Law and the UK Association for Legal and Political Philosophy. I was also much involved in the Bentham Project, which will be discussed below.32
Warwick was still a ‘new university’ when I joined. It was an intellectually exciting place and politically riven. The first Vice-Chancellor, Jack Butterworth, had from the start favoured close links with industry; this was not favoured by those on the left and this led to conflicts described in Edward Thompson’s polemic, Warwick University Ltd, published shortly before I arrived. Warwick has since been the most consistently highly rated of that generation of plate-glass universities; some of the credit for this must go to Butterworth, who made some brilliant appointments to founding chairs and let them get on with the job: Mathematics, English, Bio-Chemistry, History and Social History (who barely spoke to each other) and Economics were all outstanding and leaders in innovation. Particularly when Chairman, I was involved in various committees and working parties at University and other levels, some quite rewarding, some acrimonious, but rarely dull. All of this was a fairly typical set of undertakings for a middle-aged Law Professor, except that Warwick in the 1970s was an intellectually exciting place.
Despite all of these activities, I managed to do a fair amount of research and writing. At both Warwick and UCL it was sometimes suggested to me that I was spreading myself too thin both over outside activities and the range of topics I wrote about. This was partly true, but I can plead in mitigation that my intellectual interests were not as diverse as they seemed: Bentham was relevant to Jurisprudence, Evidence, and torture; I treated my work on Evidence as a case study of broadening any field and what is involved in a ‘law in context’ approach; the projects on law publishing and information were directed to strengthening the infrastructure of academic law and my writings in the area mostly linked legal education and scholarship with high- and middle-order theory. The crucial point was that I had one major project: from 1972 for all of my ten years at Warwick and well beyond that. Evidence was my priority. Bentham, Legal R/realism, contextual approaches, reasoning in legal contexts and comparative procedure (in which I dabbled) were all part of that project. Towards the end of my time at Warwick I published a number of ‘foothill’ essays, trying out my ideas on particular topics; several of these became an integral part of my three main books on the subject,33 which will be discussed in the chapter on Evidence. All of these were published years after I left Warwick, but the groundwork had been done during my time there. I ranged widely but I was not a dilettante. The next two chapters deal with my project on Evidence (Chapter 13) and Legal Education (Chapter 14), one scholarly and one mainly activist. Both of these belong to the Warwick period, but also overlap with the next phase after I moved to UCL in 1983 (Chapter 14).
My time at Warwick was both very stimulating and quite stressful. I thought highly of both the University and the Law School. However, after 1980 I felt that my scholarly work was being interfered with by academic administration and politics and I feared that I might be pressured into being Chairman again for several more years. Early in 1982 Jeffrey Jowell, the Dean and Head of Department at UCL Faculty of Laws, sounded me out about my possible interest in being successor to Professor Lord Lloyd of Hampstead as Quain Professor of Jurisprudence. I hesitated because Laws at UCL had the reputation of being very traditional and rather complacent, although Jowell was trying hard to change that. Eventually, after the post was advertised, I applied, was interviewed and was made an offer, which I accepted after assurances that I would not be under pressure to be Dean for at least several years. I took up the post on 1 January 1983. The next phase (1983–99) is covered in Chapters 15–19.
