Introduction

I started full-time at UCL in January 1983, having taught for one day a week in the previous term.¹ By then we had bought and settled into a house in Iffley village, within the city limits of Oxford, and this has been our much-loved home ever since. As I write, I can look down to the Thames at Iffley Lock and in order to think I can sit in my chair or lie on my bed watching the river and the circling birds; or I can walk along the river south towards London or north-east towards the city or follow several other routes in the village. The decision to make our home in Oxford was a difficult one: I hate commuting, but I am not a Londoner by temperament. The family favoured Oxford. The overall result was that I involved myself less in the general London scene and wrote much more. In order to render my dues to the Faculty of Laws, UCL and the University of London, when I was doing full-time teaching I made a point of staying in London for at least three nights a week during term, mainly sleeping three blocks from the Faculty at the Penn Club, to which I was introduced by a Quaker friend. Those three and a half to four days per week were pressured; I did most of my research and writing in Oxford.

I have been a member of UCL for nearly thirty-five years. I still have a pigeon-hole.² I made many friends, only a few foes, enjoyed collegial ‘Butler tours’ to Russia, China, and Poland,³ was stimulated by colleagues and students, was bored by committees, won a few battles, lost more and experienced many of the pleasures and pains of a fairly orthodox mid and late academic career. These are mostly peripheral to the narrative of the development of my thinking and writing, as I did most of that in the quiet of Iffley. This chapter focuses on the most relevant aspects: the institutional context, namely UCL, the Faculty of Laws, the Quain Chair of Jurisprudence and what I did, and did not do with it; my involvement with the inter-collegiate system of the University; the significance of my visits to Miami; and the relationship between my teaching and my writing between 1982 and 2000, the year that marks the start of my disengagement with UCL. This chapter is mainly about context. It provides some relevant background to the last four chapters on Legal Education, Globalisation, General Jurisprudence and ‘R/retirement’ (Chapters 17–20). To add a bit of colour Chapter 16 evokes my contrasting relations with four jurists during the UCL period: two obsessives, Jeremy Bentham and Ronald Dworkin; a kindred spirit, Neil MacCormick; and my brother-in-Evidence, Terry Anderson.

Bentham’s College

University College is often referred to as ‘Bentham’s College’ and in recent years he has been used, sometimes overused, to symbolise the whole institution for public relations purposes. The myth that he was a Founder of UCL has been thoroughly debunked, for he was nearly 80, played very little part in its planning, and was quite critical of the ‘aristocratic’ approach of two of its founders, Henry Brougham and Thomas Campbell. He probably never even set foot on the site. In a picture painted in 1922 by Henry Tonks, a large JB is in the foreground, inspecting the plans with the architect, with three smaller Founders lurking in the background. The picture, which hangs in the Flaxman gallery, has been criticised for its lack of historical accuracy and its even greater lack of artistic merit. However, interpreting Benthamiana is a tricky business: JB is known as ‘the spiritual founder’ of UCL, even though spirit in the religious sense was not part of his vocabulary. This is quite appropriate, for the central planks of UCL’s ethos are clearly Benthamite: religious tolerance, educational opportunity, freedom of speech and enquiry, useful knowledge and innovation were and still are among its cardinal values. Much of this ethos is explicit in his writings on education, especially Chrestomathia (1816).⁴

A second reason for calling UCL ‘Bentham’s College’ is his continuing material presence in public – the famous or notorious Auto-icon constructed from JB’s skeleton, his original clothes (now ‘refurbished’), his walking-stick and some memorabilia, with a head of wax based on his death mask.⁵ Anyone can today visit Mr Bentham during working hours in his cupboard in the South Cloister of UCL and giggle, stare in awe or even consult him. I will not retell the story or debunk the myths surrounding this remarkable phenomenon. I have written and spoken about it enough.⁶ I have often used the Auto-icon in teaching (what does it mean; is this where utilitarianism leads us?), emphasising its ambiguity (is this vanity, arrogance, a joke or does it have a serious message?) and its subtle mockery of treating bodies as people or sacred objects rather than material things.

On a visit to UCL, Mary Robinson, ex-President of the Irish Republic (and an ex-law teacher), spoke about ‘Imaginative Possessions’, a phrase she borrowed from W. B. Yeats.⁷ For England she instanced the common law, the English language and the place of land in our literature as formative influences on national identity; for Ireland she gave as examples the great potato famine, Seamus Heaney’s ‘two-mindedness’ (both British and Irish), and the nested identity of being at once Irish and European – all examples of the point that nationalism can be outward looking and empathetic. Tonks’s picture, the Auto-icon, and the massive collection of JB’s manuscripts are imaginative possessions that form a central part of UCL’s identity. JB feared ghosts, although he ‘knew’ that they were non-existent; one sometimes feels that the College has been possessed by the spirit of the Auto-icon, which invites frivolity, jokes and japes while sending out some sardonic, cryptic messages.⁸ For Bentham was a serious, wide-ranging, highly original, and, up to a point, influential figure. He has also been excoriated and mocked. Recent revisionist scholarship suggests that he was more profound, more subtle and more conflicted than his widespread image as a mechanistic Gradgrind or shallow cost–benefit analyst suggests. Foucault made the idea of the Panopticon prison infamous, deservedly so in my view; but Bentham has been defended at a higher level of abstraction as a pioneer of openness and transparency, especially in relation to democratic theory. For him publicity was the main element that distinguishes representative democracy from despotism, because in the former ‘some eventual faculty of effective resistance, and consequent change in government, is purposely left, or rather given, to the people’.⁹ I shall discuss my own ambivalence towards JB below. Suffice to say here that UCL does have good reason to be proud of its association with Bentham and his followers, especially in its emphasis on tolerance, reason, transnationalism and engagement with real world problems and issues.

The Faculty of Laws

There have been some excellent histories of the University of London and of UCL.¹⁰ Apart from a very useful article by John Baker (1976), the Faculty of Laws has not been so well-served.¹¹ There is room for more, especially covering the period of expansion since the 1970s. Institutions of learning need to be careful about making grand historical claims. UCL was indeed the first university institution to offer an undergraduate degree in English Law (1826) but by 1900 it had produced only 135 graduates with LLBs; UCL could also claim to have admitted the first woman law student to its courses (1873) and the first woman law graduate (1917) – different names and persons. Much more significant was the choice of the basic approach to law teaching. There were perhaps three models on offer: a School of Legislation based on Bentham’s radical ideas; the first Professor of English Law, Andrew Amos, a rising practising barrister and devoted teacher, is said to have brought ‘the fire and thunder of actual litigation’ to the classroom; and John Austin, a shy, ascetic, abstract, positivist thinker, who was the first Professor of Jurisprudence.

Bentham was discarded; Amos did not last long. Sadly Austin’s lectures failed for lack of a sufficient audience, so his principal legacy was The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, which he viewed as ‘merely prefatory’ to the full course of lectures which he never constructed. Austin was a disciple of Bentham and a committed utilitarian. It seems probable that if he had completed his plan he would also have dealt with ‘The Art of Legislation’ (what Bentham called ‘Censorial Jurisprudence’), based on utility but in a more conservative form than Bentham. On its own Austin’s Province was treated as presenting ‘General Jurisprudence’ as an abstract analytical science limited to the clarification of ‘principles, notions and distinctions’ which were a necessary part of all mature legal systems. If Austin had been a better speaker and had kept his audience both his legacy and English legal scholarship might have been very different. His idea of determining the essence or nature of positive law and of abstract analysis of what later became known as ‘fundamental legal conceptions’ provided the main basis for a dry, rigorous doctrinal tradition, based on a conservative version of positivism, isolated from both critique and the law in action.¹²

The extraordinary displacement of Bentham by followers of John Austin was a profound historical mistake: Bentham’s Censor would have put the pedestrian Expositor in his place – a fairly lowly one, not the core of legal scholarship and understanding. It is true that Bentham’s writings have to be selected carefully to be suitable fare for students, but as the excellent postgraduate course on ‘Bentham and the Utilitarian Tradition’ at UCL has shown, some of his texts make fine material for vigorous dialectical conversations with a range of opponents, critics and successors; indeed, I cannot remember having contributed to a more rigorous, enjoyable and coherent course. It sounds narrow, but Bentham ranged very widely while always coming back to a central point. His idea of a School of Legislation could perhaps have been improved by some fire and thunder, and more room could have been made for skills in handling basic concepts and detailed rules than he allowed; in time history, context, practicality and engagement with contemporary issues would have found their place in accordance with the general UCL ethos.

Alas, the dead hand of Austin’s successors prevailed and the mainstream UCL tradition in Law became a strong form of doctrinal positivism (blackletter law) backed by a rigorous uncritical version of Analytical Jurisprudence. Legend has it that Georg Schwarzenberger, a distinguished Professor of International Law, used to say when addressing first-year students: ‘This is not a Faculty of Justice; this is not a Faculty of Law; this is The Faculty of Laws.’ Of course, there were individuals who deviated from this view, but nevertheless the core of the tradition was that students studied leges rather than ius.

In 1906–8 UCL, King’s and the newly formed LSE agreed to pool many of their teaching resources under the umbrella of the University of London. The inter-collegiate system lasted in various forms until the mid-1960s at undergraduate level and until the late 1990s at postgraduate level. This mitigated the influence of Austinianism, made it possible to build up a strong full-time faculty and catered for a variety of constituencies: full-time and part-time undergraduates; the External system and a path-breaking, expansive, and eventually anarchic, postgraduate programme. I have told the detailed story elsewhere.¹³

In 1982 Jeffrey Jowell (now Sir), South African-born, ex-Oxford, LSE and Harvard, anti-apartheid activist, public law scholar and public intellectual, became Dean of the Faculty. From the outset he was concerned to move UCL Laws in the direction of more liberal, pluralistic, socially aware and reform-minded approaches. He recruited some sympathetic ‘heavies’ as professors: Bob Hepple (later Sir), a fellow South African and anti-apartheid activist (one of Mandela’s lawyers in the Rivonia trial) and an influential Labour Law and Torts specialist;¹⁴ Malcolm Grant (now Sir) who, like Patrick McAuslan, specialised in Planning Law as well as Land Law, with similar views and who later became a dynamic, inevitably controversial, President and Provost of UCL; and myself from the supposedly radical Warwick Law School. Later we were joined by, among others, Hazel Genn, a leading socio-legal scholar and public figure (Dean 2008–17 and now a Dame). It was an uphill task, because the tradition was well-entrenched and many colleagues had grown up in it. However, it is fair to say that over time UCL Laws became much more pluralistic and empirically oriented, thanks in large part to Jowell’s leadership and appointments.

I did not try to ‘Warwickise’ UCL Laws, but I did introduce an element of coursework assessment, the idea of options within a course, some ideas about ways of introducing students to the study of law and a different conception of Jurisprudence. I also tried to contribute to a cosmopolitan culture, which started with the expanding postgraduate programme and filtered down to the undergraduates when English and French, English and Spanish, English and Italian and English and German Law degrees were introduced, accompanied by cadres of lively students from Continental Europe.¹⁵ I did introduce an opt-in provision for a non-specialist four-year LLB but, as at Warwick, this failed miserably because of lack of uptake and lack of enthusiasm on the part of colleagues. For the Sesquicentennial Celebrations of the University of London in 1986 I wrote a quite light-hearted piece called ‘1836 and All That: Laws in London 1836–1986’.¹⁶ There were three serious themes: that the scale and style of university legal education in England has been largely demand-led; that the most successful periods in the history of Law in London until 1986 had been when the various Law departments and faculties of the University had co-operated by pooling their resources in ‘the inter-collegiate system’ which flourished at undergraduate level from 1908 to about 1965 and continued in the massive LLM, involving five law schools, eighty different courses (at least on paper in 1987), nearly 500 students in 1987 and over 1,000 not much later.¹⁷ I wrote a prose-poem in praise of the intercollegiate LLM which I later spent six months trying to save in 1993–4, but which inanely disintegrated around the Millennium, resulting in unnecessary conflict, much duplication and the withering away of many specialist options. I also praised the provision of opportunities to study for London Law degrees externally which continues today as part of ‘the University of London International Programme’, with the undergraduate LLB and a Certificate in Common Law still intercollegiate. This had not been a good vehicle for academic innovation. For most of its history the External LLB and LLM were not exciting intellectually, but their social history is magnificent, with many prisoners, including British prisoners of war, interned African nationalists and many others from many spheres and countries, obtaining Law degrees by distance learning.

The Quain Chair of Jurisprudence

The Chair of Jurisprudence at UCL was one of the two founding Chairs of UCL Laws. Jurisprudence and Legal Theory (sic) is still a compulsory subject within the LLB,¹⁸ whereas it has become optional at Queen’s Belfast and in many English and Welsh universities, but remains compulsory in leading Scottish law schools. At the end of the nineteenth century under the will of a former Professor of Anatomy, Richard Quain, four chairs were endowed in his memory and that of his brother, Sir John, a barrister and judge. By the time I took up appointment as Quain Professor of Jurisprudence the only discernible benefit for me was an annual Quain dinner for which the food (but I think not the drink) was paid for from the diminished Quain Fund. It looks as if the Quain family got a bargain. I was not much impressed by the title, nor were my children who called me the Quaint Professor; but other people were – to an extraordinary extent. When I joined UCL in 1983, I thought that Warwick was the better law school and that I was coming down in the world; but others (not only at UCL) seemed to be hugely impressed by the title and, more rationally, by the prestige of UCL; some were surprised at my appointment, because there may well have been better-regarded candidates. My five predecessors included two knights and one lord, who had all earned their honours by public service of various kinds. They were all scholars and public intellectuals. John Austin was an influential jurist, but Sir John MacDonnell, Sir Sheldon Amos and Lord (Denis) Lloyd are mainly remembered, if at all, as men of affairs rather than for their contributions to Jurisprudence. One is not remembered. Another exception was Glanville Williams, the leading criminal law scholar of his generation, who probably did much of the groundwork for his major books while at UCL, but published most of them after he moved to Cambridge in 1955.¹⁹ Nearly all of them in their different ways could be called middle-order theorists, because they were concerned with the contemporary relevance of their work to genuinely practical issues. I was happy to follow in their footsteps, for that is how I see myself.

In 1983 the Quain Professor was still Professor of Jurisprudence for the whole University of London, not just UCL. This meant that it included responsibility for co-ordinating the teaching of theory courses in the intercollegiate LLM and in the External LLB, as well at all levels in UCL.²⁰ I also tried to build a legal theory community by initiating a University-wide seminar the organisation of which circulated around the six Law Schools until, about year six, it came to a halt at Birkbeck where it stayed. Even in 1983 there were signs that the University might fragment into a series of independent institutions, as the larger ones – UCL, Imperial, King’s, LSE and Queen Mary and Westfield – were already the size of middling universities and were expanding. From the start I was committed to preserving the University of London despite its rather heavy central bureaucracy, because there were distinct advantages in co-operation rather than competition, and Senate House protected smaller institutions such as SOAS, Royal Holloway, Goldsmith’s College and a number of other valuable units, including the Senate Institutes of which the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) was one. Accordingly, I devoted myself to University affairs as much as UCL ones. In 1993–4, I was seconded to Senate House (Graham Greene’s ‘Ministry of Fear’) for six months to try to salvage the inter-collegiate LLM which was in danger of being scandalously underfunded.²¹

One of my first actions as Quain Professor was to review the curriculum for the ‘theory courses’ in the LLB, the LLM and the External LLB. Each presented different problems. Unfortunately, in the UCL, LLB Jurisprudence was in the final year. Some students resented having to take a compulsory course on ‘theory’ and were apprehensive because it seemed very different from what they were used to. There were several challenges: ensuring teamwork and individual space for a quite varied collection of colleagues eager to teach theory;²² to try to help professionally oriented students to understand why theory was relevant to them and to learn to think in more abstract ways than they were used to; and to try to get Jurisprudence moved to the second year where it belongs, so that it can feed off and feed into other courses and help to give some coherence to the undergraduate degree. My theoretically oriented colleagues were an outstanding, talented, individualistic bunch, but hardly a team. We decided to do nearly all of the teaching by seminars, but to have one lecture a week in the LLB course as a supplement. This was my best opportunity to use the Quain Chair as a platform or pulpit for my views, but my colleagues wanted to participate, so the programme of lectures also became a compromise. Nearly all of my successors have seen the Quain Chair more as a platform than a job.

In contrast with these eager teachers the undergraduates seemed to me collectively to present a sullen, even hostile front to the course, at least in October. Although not all were destined for legal practice, UCL Laws’ student culture appeared to be dominated by those who had secured training places in city solicitors’ firms or aspired to do so. What was the relevance of ‘theory’ to them? Some were anti-intellectual, more were just unintellectual, some just wanted to do what was necessary to get a good class of degree. Most had gained a place at UCL because they were very good examinees. For them one difficulty was that they were used to substantive law courses examined by three-hour unseen exams and Jurisprudence was different in several ways. Later in the year it became clear that some were or had become genuinely interested.

My attempted solution to these twin problems of teachers’ enthusiasms and student resistance was to introduce a considerable amount of choice within the Jurisprudence course: Part I was a general introduction to the field. We each took one or two seminar groups. I insisted that students should be exposed to reading original texts but gave some flexibility to the teachers to choose what texts to use beyond Hart’s The Concept of Law, some Bentham and some Dworkin. Following Hart’s example,²³ I extended the number of questions in the exam from four out of nine to three out of twelve (with some alternatives within a question). We divided Part II of the course into a series of options: three weeks on a ‘Major work’ (popularly known as ‘big book’) chosen from four or five texts, with a compulsory question on the exam for each book. In some years I used The Cheyenne Way, or Jeremy Waldron’s Nonsense Upon Stilts (attacks on natural rights by Bentham, Burke and Marx), and once, not very successfully, Plato’s Gorgias. My stated rationale was that anyone graduating with a Law degree from UCL should at least have read one whole book; many recognised that this made a valid point about our curriculum and practices. Then six weeks was devoted to a special topic, again from four or five options, each supervised by a different colleague, to be assessed by a substantial essay (maximum 8,000 words) counting for 25 per cent of the mark. Thus, my colleagues had some scope for choice in the first part and two lots of quite open choices in the second part. In the beginning, for the students, choice within a course was revolutionary, or at least novel, as was writing a substantial essay for assessment. They worried inordinately about these choices. By the start of term two the resistance was dissipated for most, although for some even the thought of an assessed essay was worrying. But it worked. Over the years I was repeatedly surprised and pleased in May at how the resistant students I had met in October could produce such excellent work.²⁴

In my view, legal theory belongs in every year in different forms, but in a three-year degree the main Jurisprudence course should be in the second year, building on and illuminating ‘bread and butter courses’.²⁵ I soon managed to capture some territory by organising the first-year undergraduate introduction course and to introduce at least some general perspectives and basic skills for beginning law students.²⁶ I emphasised that they had all experienced law, that mastering the jargon was no more difficult than learning a hundred words before going on holiday to Italy or Spain, and that far from being dry, esoteric and mysterious, Law is an exciting, important, humanistic discipline.²⁷ That course was attenuated because teachers of first-year subjects were raring to go and resisted allowing the introductory bit to last more than two or three weeks. And, of course, the first week was usually Freshers’ week, so the audience for inspirational teaching was mainly composed of hung-over, homesick, bewildered teenagers.

At postgraduate level I had more scope. Candidates for the LLM were allowed to claim that they had specialised if they took three out of their four courses in one subject group. We created a Legal Theory Group: UCL took the main responsibility for Jurisprudence; LSE took on a new course on Law and Social Theory; we recognised a few other courses as being members of the group and over time we added Alternative Dispute Resolution, ‘Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarian Tradition’ and my half-course on Evidence and Proof. I took responsibility for the Jurisprudence course and, as in the LLB, I introduced ‘special topics’ from which students could choose, to start with mine being ‘Reason, Reasoning and Rationality in Legal Contexts?’, which nearly became my next major project.²⁸ I also regularly taught Evidence and Proof, often with help from Christopher Allen and Professor Philip Dawid from Statistics.

The PhD degree was also awarded by the University of London. I did not take on many doctoral students, partly because until recently PhDs were rare in Law – the situation has now changed – but also because I did not approve of the way it was structured in London at the time: no postgraduate community; no methods courses; uneven supervision – with the result that most doctoral students were lonely long-distance runners focusing for three years or more of their lives on a single narrow question with very little support. On two occasions at conferences I floated a paper motion that the PhD in Law as practised in England was ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’ in violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It was never put to a vote, but many colleagues acknowledged the point. Today the practice has greatly improved and if I had started now I would have recruited many more doctoral students.

The External LLB also had a Jurisprudence course. Soon after taking up the post, I convened a meeting of theory teachers in the University of London to discuss it. If I remember right about fifteen people turned up and expressed strongly conflicting views, illustrating the pluralism of Legal Theory in London. It soon came clear that there would be no consensus. So, as chairman, I asked for a volunteer to design the syllabus. Only Stephen Guest offered to help and he took it over and organised it for years. He did a very good job in his own way, but I soon regretted that I had not taken it on myself as it would have been a good opportunity to design a course that reflected my view of Jurisprudence and was suited to distance learning. At the time I felt that I had my hands full with the internal courses.²⁹

Postgraduate affairs

In 1988 during yet another period of financial austerity, UCL introduced a Draconian policy of suspending students whose fees had not been paid. I was postgraduate adviser to two Ugandan students who were on government scholarships. This was just after the Amin and Obote periods, the civil war with the Lord’s Resistance Army had begun, Uganda was in turmoil and it was hardly surprising that the government was behind with scholarship payments. After two warnings the Registrar suspended these two students (along with others) without a hearing. I was outraged. After unavailing attempts to appeal and an acerbic correspondence with the administration, I decided to take stronger action. This was the period when fees for overseas students were becoming an important income stream. I had been doing a lot in helping to recruit overseas students for UCL (the Law Teachers’ Programme was part of this – Chapter 17); I picked up the relevant files and stormed down to the Dean’s office and plonked them on his desk, saying (well, not quite shouting) that I could not recommend UCL to overseas applicants when it treated students like this and so I would no longer recruit for the College. The Dean, Jeffrey Jowell, backed me; probably his only other option was to order me to continue to carry out my duties or face dismissal, even though my recruitment activities were mainly voluntary. After a delay the suspensions of the Ugandan pair were terminated, but they had lost a year. There were matters of principle involved and other students were affected, so I insisted that an adhoc committee be set up at College level. That was done reluctantly and ineffectually. I am not usually confrontational, but I was so angry that I was prepared to leave UCL. Jeffrey was sympathetic, but surprised at the strength of my reaction. This, I think, was not really because I had been born in Uganda, but rather because an injustice was being done to ‘my’ students.

There were several outcomes of this episode: the students were reinstated and helped from a hardship fund, but they had lost a year. I had made some enemies in the central administration, but maybe the procedures were softened; a committee was set up, but their first meeting was delayed until the autumn; I was not invited to meet them and in the end they did not seem to take the matter seriously. Most significant, I was persuaded to take on the position of Postgraduate Tutor in Laws, in charge of the whole postgraduate programme including admissions, staff–student relations and curriculum development. I have never enjoyed administration so much.

I took over from Andrew Lewis, who had done a sympathetic job in a rather formal way. I was surprised to find how much power and discretion were vested in this position. I insisted on the establishment of a Postgraduate Committee with student representatives to give authority to important decisions. I also persuaded Jeffrey Jowell that I needed a deputy. Alison Clarke joined me and was wonderful with the students. With Lorely Teulon as the efficient administrator our three-person team set about improving the whole system. I was popular with the postgrads from the start, perhaps because of my support for the Ugandans. My aim was to strengthen the academic programme, improve the facilities and generally integrate the postgraduates into the life of the institution.

As a symbolic act I cased Bentham House from basement to roof garden examining the pictures in the ‘circulation areas’. Almost all were portraits or photographs. I reported that they depicted only two categories of person: single, mostly ageing (though not all white) males (famous alumni and distinguished professors) and groups of undergraduates, also nearly all male. There was not a single picture of even one postgraduate student. This was not because they were less photogenic; rather they were invisible in most respects: undergraduates were supposed to be represented on the Faculty Board, but they were not; the Student Law Society was really for ‘weenies’, as we used to call them in Chicago; there was no special physical place for postgrads in Bentham House, so they gravitated to IALS which housed the postgraduate law library and most rarely came to the Faculty. There were other ways that they were on their own. Some colleagues chose not to involve themselves in postgraduate teaching on the grounds that the standards were lower because entry was not competitive and they saw postgrads as both inferior and peripheral. In fact, the normal entry standard for the LLM was an Upper Second, many of the students were mature with varied experiences of life, including legal practice, most were motivated to learn – why else do postgraduate work? On the other hand, undergraduate admissions favoured 18-year-olds who were good examinees, who had been institutionalised for life (except for a few who were ‘mature’ (over 23) or had taken gap years). Sometimes their main motivation seemed to be to get through the hoops as quickly as possible to complete a rite de passage in order to join the legal establishment. This is, of course, unfair to many intelligent and interesting individuals. It was not the students’ fault; rather it is the structural weakness of a system of three-year Law degrees for 18–21-year-olds (the shortest in the world), with an over-burdened curriculum largely dictated by practitioners, who would pressure these children to make premature career choices and swot up masses of doctrine only to tell them later that History graduates were favoured by the best firms because they had uncluttered minds.³⁰

In 1993–94 I was seconded to Senate House for six months to undertake a review of the vast and unwieldy intercollegiate LLM as part of efforts to save the University of London from disintegrating through underfunding and resulting potential scandals.³¹ By then the programme had over 1,500 students and virtually no central administration. This turned out to be less of a poisoned chalice than I had expected, because teachers of innovative, recondite or less populated subjects knew that the opportunity to teach them would probably disappear if each College offered its own LLM. They were proved right. With the help of Lee Sheridan, my former colleague from Belfast, we imposed some order and improved the resources. The intercollegiate degree survived for a few years. It was an ungainly beast, uneven in quality but adventurous intellectually and it pioneered some significant new developments. However intercollegiate rivalry eventually trumped innovation and specialist enclaves, and the LLM was foolishly replaced by several more narrowly focused programmes that largely replicated each other.

Research and writing

UCL is a great centre of scholarship, including innovative and cross-disciplinary work. I found both the Faculty and the College very supportive in this regard. Splitting my time between London and Iffley, interspersed with a fair amount of travel at particular seasons, made for efficiency in managing my time and priorities. I prepared my teaching, taught and administered in London for a hectic four days a week from October to March; weekends and most of April to September were devoted to library research, thinking, conversing and writing mainly in Oxford at a more stately pace.

My research, writing and publication from 1982 to 2000 divides into four main areas. First, having spent ten years at Warwick doing the groundwork on Evidence, without publishing much, nearly all my main publications in that field came out in the first ten years at UCL. I continued to be active in the field for much longer, but the main books (Rethinking Evidence, Analysis of Evidence, Theories of Evidence: Bentham and Wigmore) belong to that period (see above Chapter 14). In 1983 I became Chairman of the Commonwealth Legal Education Association (CLEA) for almost a decade and during the same period I also published a lot on legal education and its infrastructures, but these were more ‘activist’ projects, as described in Chapter 17. My 1994 Hamlyn Lectures, Blackstone’s Tower, was the most scholarly of my writings about legal education. After that I wrote little on the subject until a brief revival of interest in the aftermath of the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) of 2013. Similarly, my main writings on Bentham date from my time as Chairman of the Bentham Committee (1982–2000) and most were explanatory or celebratory, rather than original contributions to Bentham scholarship. Globalisation and Law became my first priority as I wound down my work on Evidence in the mid-1990s (Chapters 18 and 19). Similarly, my main research and reading for that project was in the 1990s, but the three main books belong to the period of ‘R/retirement’.

Evidence, Legal Education, Globalisation, Bentham – ‘Why is a Professor of Jurisprudence writing about these topics rather than contributing to contemporary debates within Legal Philosophy?’ someone might ask. Indeed, some did. The simple answer is that I am not that kind of jurist. Rethinking Evidence was always conceived as a case study illustrating what may be involved in ‘broadening the study of Law from within’. That surely is a theoretical enquiry. The central question of my Globalisation and Law project was: what might be the implications of ‘globalisation’ for Law as a discipline and for Jurisprudence as its theoretical part? The mission of the discipline of Law is to advance understanding of its subject matters, viz. legal ideas and phenomena. Except perhaps for some of my more polemical papers on legal education, the great bulk of my work was theoretical in this sense. I was doing my job.

I still have a pigeon-hole at UCL, but for health reasons I visit it rarely. What I have enjoyed most of all about UCL has been its cosmopolitan ambiance. By the mid-1990s there were postgraduates from over sixty countries, lively undergraduates and postgraduates from Continental Europe, intending law teachers from several parts of Africa, post-apartheid South Africans, Bangalore graduates, and later even a few North Americans and Latin Americans had joined the long-standing flow of Greek shipping lawyers. It reminded me of the passage from Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man that I had used to symbolise the Great Juristic Bazaar.³² I loved the atmosphere and the vitality and I am confident that the spirit of JB, the Citizen of the World, takes maximum pleasure from it.

American interludes II (Miami 1971–2011)

My relationship with Florida, with the University of Miami Law School, and my close friend and collaborator, Terry Anderson, started in 1978. But it really belongs to the UCL period and the early years of retirement and fits in well here.

I first went to Florida in 1971 to visit Soia Mentschikoff with some last questions about KLRM. I was stressed about the book. I had recently seen Midnight Cowboy (the movie), in which, after exploring low-life New York with a Texan hustler called Ratso (Dustin Hoffman), Joe accompanies him on a Greyhound bus from New York to Miami. The film ends with Joe cradling the dead Ratso in his arms as they arrive at their destination. In 1971 I boarded a Greyhound Bus in Philadelphia. For the length of Florida, which seemed very long indeed, I kept looking sideways at my soporific companion to make sure that he was still alive.

This was the start of my forty-year association with Coral Gables, first as a private guest of Soia and later as a frequent Visiting Professor at the University of Miami Law School (hereafter UM). From 1969 Soia regularly taught for a semester at the Law School. She said she liked it because ‘they have sand in their shoes’. However, she accepted appointment as Dean in 1974; it became Soia’s School and continued to be so for some time after her retirement in 1983 and even her death in 1985.

On another short visit in 1978 I gave a Faculty seminar on Wigmore’s chart method and after being quizzed on my Llewellyn book, I was invited to be a Visiting Professor. I was not able to accept until 1981 when I came for a few weeks to co-teach a seminar on ‘Dispute Resolution’ with the Dean. This meant that she attended the first and last sessions. After covering The Cheyenne Way and several anthropological case studies I introduced them to Wigmore’s chart method, including analysing Edith Thompson’s deathly letters to her lover. At the end we held the first, and most festive ever, Wigmore Day on Soia’s boat dock outside her home; the students put on a Bywaters and Thompson show with 1920s music, as well as analysing some of the evidence. Throughout Soia lounged on a deckchair in a baseball cap, intervening only once to ask of Edith’s letters ‘Who said these were LOVE letters?’³³

By 1981 Terry Anderson and I had agreed to collaborate on a book on Analysis of Evidence.³⁴ Since then we have continued as collaborators, co-teachers and close friends despite his contempt for deadlines. Terry deserves a section to himself in the next chapter, but before that I must say something of my relationship with the Law School.

From 1978 until 2011 I had an open invitation to be a Visiting Professor in the UM Law School. Initially I could only get away during UCL long vacations (the hurricane season), but then after ‘early retirement’ in most years I was able to go for the whole spring semester (January to May the best time of year) thereby missing the worst of the English winter. One should remember that Montesquieu as jurist emphasised the importance of climate in legal culture. Usually I taught Analysis of Evidence and a seminar; I could fill a whole book with accounts of experiences (including Hurricane Andrew, the build up to the Iraq War and 9/11), Florida pastimes (Penelope volunteered in two wonderful botanic gardens and we both frequented the Biltmore Hotel’s famous swimming pool) and some memorable and warm friendships – far too many to do justice to here. Instead I shall focus on how my teaching, research and writing were enhanced by this arrangement.

These visits were enormously productive from my point of view. My globalisation seminar fertilised, broadened and advanced my work in the area (Chapters 18 and 19). Much the same applies to the Evidence courses, both on my own and especially co-teaching with Terry Anderson. The Library was excellent and easy to use and the support from librarians, Faculty assistants and others was tremendous; I took advantage of free photocopying. American law teachers do not realise how lucky they are in having this kind of support until they visit institutions in other countries. If I had chosen to, I could have made my job much easier than hustling, as Ratso suggested. Rather, having no administrative duties or micro-political diversions, I seized the opportunity to read, research, converse and write in optimal conditions.

For me the intellectual hub of the Law School was the programme of almost weekly Faculty seminars at which visiting speakers were challenged and colleagues, especially younger ones, were treated only a bit more gently. Papers were usually circulated in advance and, whatever the topic, were read carefully and questions prepared by a core of those who turned up regularly. Speakers were usually allocated about fifteen minutes, but by convention they could be interrupted at any time. On my first presentation I was thrown by an early intervention.³⁵ I tried to follow the example of those colleagues who prepared assiduously every week, because I felt that this was collegiality at its best. It took time, but it was doubly rewarding. On almost every visit I volunteered to present a paper to a Faculty seminar and at some workshop or conference; in addition to having my early drafts mauled by Terry, I was free to ask for comments from individual colleagues who nearly always complied.³⁶ I have not kept count, but I reckon that over twenty of my subsequent publications went through the Miami mill. This practice is widespread in academic law, but this was the best version that I have ever encountered. So, thank you.

There was one downside to being a perpetual Visitor. I did not feel that I belonged and some colleagues were unsure how to treat me. Was I a perennial guest? Or a full member? Or an intriguing foreigner? Or just a hanger on? For the most part this uncertain status did not bother me. However, I sometimes felt critical of local practices or conventions, but thought that expressing my views, however diplomatically, would be considered out of place. Opinions on intellectual issues, yes; but on conventions and policies, not my business. The most important example was that I felt that the Law School was missing opportunities to become a, perhaps even the, national centre of research and education about Latin American and/or Caribbean legal affairs. Miami was often talked of as ‘the capital of Latin America’, economically and culturally, as well as for cruises and shopping. The Law School had a few individual scholars interested in Latin American or other regional studies, but this was not an institutional priority. Early on, I asked why there were no courses taught in Spanish and no Law School cricket team. The response was that the Association of American Law Schools (or the American Bar Association) would not allow the first and that cricket was not known in Miami. Both excuses were untrue.³⁷ Some twenty years later a single course in Spanish was introduced to great fanfare and no objections. I had good contacts in the Caribbean and offered to do a tour to establish some links, but this was shrugged off as a boondoggle (hustling?).

As I interpret it, Soia Mentschikoff transformed a modest, but well-regarded local professional school into a national one and encouraged an outward-looking perspective, but the orientation was international and European rather than regional. By the time Soia died US News and Report law school rankings had only just begun (1983) and were not yet taken seriously. With the steady growth in influence of such indicators over time the highly controversial ‘rankings game’ came to the fore. When I first encountered these phenomena in the 1980s I was first amused, then highly critical.³⁸ Eventually what really shocked me was how seriously they were taken by nearly all the relevant ‘stakeholders’ – parents, students, alumni, administrators, funders, others, especially journalists and, reluctantly, even academics. The story is a long, complicated and, to my mind, tragic one. To put the matter very simply: the UM Law School might have tried to become a great centre of regional legal studies; instead it opted into the national league table model, struggling to hold its place in the second division with significant economic disadvantages compared to both publicly funded and well-endowed Ivy League institutions. Their competitive advantage was, and still is, location, location, location.

If I had become a tenured faculty member of a US law school, even if half-time, I would have felt obliged to commit to fighting to persuade my institution to break out of the stranglehold of the ‘football league model’,³⁹ by which the law schools have been squeezed into conforming to one set of aims and one set of criteria. American friends tell me that I would have lost and that the game would have been hopeless, not least for a foreigner.⁴⁰ They could be right. In the event I did not try at all hard to get such a position, because we preferred the UK as a place to live.⁴¹