ABSTRACT
I have argued in Chapter 1 for the application of Galison’s metaphor of a trading zone to be applied to the interdisciplinarity of legal education. However, in applying the metaphor we need to be aware of the different contexts of use between research scientists and legal educators.1 One of the key points of Galison’s research was the extent to which the research cultures and methods of particle physics research had been profoundly affected by the material culture of the research teams. The same is true of the material culture of learning. But in legal education the community often uses the same basic structure repeatedly (a seminar, for instance), altering content, micro-structure, adapting to context of student knowledge, aims, wider context of the seminar and so forth. Practice, in other words, requires a sense of ongoing and cumulative activity within a discipline; continuity of practice in concept, ideology, material objects and method; and the critical task of educational dissection or archaeology. It also requires a set of standards by which the community of practice judges its performance, individually and as a community. How might Galison’s research communities t with this type of practice?
