ABSTRACT
In this chapter I describe the different types of institutional knowledge that exist in law, how they interact with each other and how they may be seen to be founded on different features of the legal institutional context. Following Tsoukas (1996, 1998b, Tsoukas and Vladimirou 2001), I will argue that while it is true that the propositional structure of legal knowledge is fully realised within formal legal contexts this tells us only part of the story. As well as being institutions, formal legal contexts are also practices; that is, shared traditions in and out of which legal practitioners live and work. In this latter sense, legal knowledge has a narrative structure, maintained by story, anecdote and example. However, these two features of legal institutional knowledge sit uncomfortably alongside each other: there is an uneasy tension between the propositional form of legal knowledge fundamentally associated with law as an institution and the narrative form of legal knowledge associated with law as a shared tradition or practice. In order to survive as a practice, law requires its institutions to be strong but these same institutions, by their very nature, as they strengthen and become more autonomous, begin to act as a corrosive influence on the shared tradition; nonetheless, without its foundation in a shared tradition law as an institution is weak and unproductive and incapable of functioning. Thus, some equilibrium must be achieved, its tension negotiated and maintained. Here are two examples of propositional statements in statute:
If a person-
(a) drives or attempts to drive a motor vehicle on a road or other public place, or
(b) is in charge of a motor vehicle on a road or other public place,
after consuming so much alcohol that the proportion of it in his breath, blood or urine exceeds the prescribed limit he is guilty of an offence.
