The lingering core of legal scholarship

The purpose of this paper is to consider how leading scholars are interpreting the role and status of the core tenets of legal scholarship in England and Australia – the tenets that have provided an element of unity in legal scholarship over the past century or so. Instead of focusing on the way that scholarship has diversified and expanded, the paper considers whether elements of the prior orthodoxy have remained: do the tenets persist, what status are they afforded and what impact will their presence have on the future identity of the discipline and its conception of law? The paper captures insights into the way that scholars – as opposed to administrators or managers – are interpreting changes in the discipline. It is based on the premise that scholarly attitudes can shape the discipline and that therefore such attitudes are worthy of study.