ABSTRACT
Legal education. In these two words we are bringing together two very different disciplines – law and education – and in this and the next chapter I’d like to explore just what is involved when we engage in interdisciplinary research and teaching. From the outset there is a key distinction to be made between cross-disciplinary or multi-disciplinarity research and interdisciplinarity, as a Royal Society report on the subject pointed out:
And there are defensive mechanisms operating at the boundaries of disciplines, as Becher has pointed out:
In spite of this, disciplines have for some time now had more of an open architecture than before: trespassing appears to be a common activity, not only between what might be regarded as cognate disciplines such as law, literature, history, theology and philosophy, but between the sciences and social sciences (Klein, 1995). The effect of Darwinian science on Victorian literature, for example, has been charted by Gillian Beer and others (Beer, 1983; 1995; Levine, 1988; Stafford, 1994; Jordanova, 1986). More particularly, the biological hypothesis of
organic memory has been analysed by Laura Otis who, in her study, excavates the history of this way of thinking about the body throughout the nineteenth century, and takes case studies of European literature as examples of how the theory was propagated and represented to society. She reveals how the science becomes analogous to other things in literature; and how in turn these things mirror the science to society: ‘[a]s in image reconstruction, the image [of the organic memory hypothesis] became clear only when viewed from many perspectives simultaneously’ (Otis, 1994, p. xii).1 In jurisprudence, Roberto Unger developed his notion of ‘expanded discourse’ in defence of a version of interdisciplinarity (1983, p. 561); while the concept of autopoesis arose from biological autopoesis, and its application by Piero Sraffa, Nikolas Luhmann, Günther Teubner and others to social sciences, then law in particular.2
