ABSTRACT
The nature and purpose of academic research in law has been controversial ever since law began to be established as a discipline in the English universities during the second half of the nineteenth century. There have been longrunning debates about whether the purpose of legal research should be to produce commentaries and other analyses which are primarily of use for practising lawyers, providing ‘a house of intellect for the professions’ as suggested by Savage and Watt (1996) or whether academic legal research should share the intellectual and theoretical objectives of other disciplines in the academy. This academic/vocational debate has another related aspect: whether law should be analysed using a doctrinal approach – focusing almost exclusively on legal materials such as reported cases and statutes – which would be the approach of the majority of practising lawyers (Goff 1983: 171), or whether academic lawyers should draw on other disciplines – anything from economics and politics to literature and media studies – to analyse legal phenomena from a purely academic perspective (Bradney 1998: passim).
