ABSTRACT
The way in which scholars and students characterise a phenomenon academically is of enormous – and often underappreciated – significance, especially when it comes to aspects of the law. How we characterise an area of law – or, in other words, what the dominant academic paradigm of that subject is – affects how we customarily think about it, write about it and teach it. Crucially, it also affects our normative perspective on that subject. That is to say, it determines what we regard to be its strengths and weaknesses, its ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’, and the appropriate course of its future development. The opinions and attitudes that are shaped in legal monographs, law review articles and law school classrooms do not just echo around the proverbial ivory towers of elite academic institutions. Ultimately – albeit often very gradually – they trickle down into the so-called ‘real world’, either when former students of the law later become influential practitioners of it or when leading academic texts are used by judicial or policy-making figures to help shape their critical understanding of challenging legal issues.
