ABSTRACT
In a keynote address the educationalist Joseph Schwab (1970, p. 4) warned against what he called ‘inveterate, unexamined, and mistaken reliance on theory’. He dismissed the search for a single theory of education that would be a foundation for all, and instead advocated a ‘polyfocal conspectus’, a drawing together of theories and experience. The six case studies in the last two chapters have been chosen in order to shed light on each other, but principally to illustrate the necessity for interdisciplinary research and practice within legal education. In a perceptive footnote Galison compares his own practice in Image and Logic to that of Callon-Latour as observers of scientic research process, noting how others had seen resemblances between their methods:
There in a couple of sentences we have the problems of research and practice that we have to work with in legal education: the balance of elasticity and obstacle, of leveraged power against delimited action. The case studies in these two chapters are indicative of alliances and contexts, material and methods, failures and successes. They reveal that we can nd useful experiments, descriptions, texts and progenitors in the most surprising of contexts; that our research work requires grounding in research methodologies that are not merely our own, and that we need to give careful thought to the meta-translation of that research to our own practice.
