Fear and Loathing in Legal Academia: Legal Academics’ Perceptions of Their Field and Their Curious Imaginaries of How ‘Outsiders’ Perceive It

No doubt many legal academics can point to social exchanges which suggest that some ‘others’/‘outsiders’, whether within the academy or among the lay public, have a fairly limited insight into what legal academics do or the kind of concerns which drive legal academic research. Based on her interviews conducted during 2002 and 2003 with 54 U.K. legal academics, Cownie notes how outsiders, even within the academy, ‘frequently characterise law as vocational’.

Id. at 78.

The accounts presented, of course, do not present empirical insights about how non-legal academics do in fact perceive the discipline of law. That is not the aim of either study. Cownie's work was aimed at gaining insights into the (wider) lived experiences of those legal academics, and Owen and Noblet sought to explore environmental legal professors’ attitudes towards, and experiences of, cross-disciplinary work. Nevertheless, while not their aim, there is a risk of being left with the impression that non-legal academics do in fact commonly or frequently miscast the legal discipline and the work of legal academics. While Cownie's research and Owen and Noblet's study reveals the experiences of some legal academics finding themselves being mischaracterized by ‘others’/‘outsiders’, and presents a fascinating hypothesis for empirical evaluation, those accounts constitute an unreliable proxy for identifying what ‘others’ do in fact know or believe about legal academics.

Stolker's work provides the source of the ‘thought experiment’.

Supranote 12.

Stolker's imaginary of ‘others’, of course, strongly intersects with accounts based on anecdotal reports. Rather than offering a description based on external evidence (and perhaps also falling short of a genuine ‘thought-experiment’), how the ‘other’/‘outsider’ thinks stands as pure assertion. The ‘other’, he imagines, encounters difficulties in understanding what legal academics do, but also curiously s/he appears to possess a sophisticated level of insight in picking up some key ingredients of the internal norms of the field. Further elements of Stolker's ‘other’/‘outsider’ depiction are contestable. First, his portrayal of how ‘other’ disciplines will view legal scholarship looks suspiciously like an ‘insider’ perspective, given that the concerns raised can be detected in many legal scholars’ evaluations of legal academia in Anglo-American literature. Secondly, while Stolker is concerned that ‘others’ will find it hard to get a clear picture of what legal academics do, this seems every bit as applicable to the ‘insider’. It might be noted that even for legal scholars it is quite a tall order to ‘presume broad knowledge’ of the research practices which inhabit the field, given the volume of work produced and the wide variety of sub-specialisms within it.

Owen & Noblet, supranote 17, at 890.

The largest category in terms of ‘how others/outsiders regard us’ as a theme arising in legal scholarship, is far trickier to classify. In general, it is often unclear who the other/outsider is, and such work frequently slips and slides between others/outsiders who are out there in ‘the world’ or (non-legal) others/outsiders within the academic community. Either way, the emphasis is upon the ‘other’ as an outsider, standing external to the legal academy. While evidently not based upon empirical research, nor offered explicitly as ‘thought experiments’ or highlighted as based on anecdotal experience, in the work we analyzed, the views expressed take the form of pure assertions, albeit ones which often appear to operate as rhetorical devices. Take for example, Smits who notes that ‘not only do outsiders accuse legal science of being unacademic, but also legal scholars themselves no longer seem to know which discipline they practice’.

Smits, supranote 4, at 4.

Of course, the call for more engagement with empirical approaches in legal scholarship has been a strong feature of debate within legal academia over the past few decades,

Genn, Partington, & Wheeler, supranote 4; Hillyard, supranote 4.

The use of the ‘other’/‘outsider’ trope as a rhetorical device by which to contemplate the discipline and provoke contemplation of the tensions and shifts within it, also emerges within Vick's work around legal academia and interdisciplinarity.

Vick, supranote 20.

Still sitting within the category of ‘assertion’ about how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ regard legal academics, is the complaint that legal scholars are not regarded at all. In the early 80s, Mark Tushnet famously highlighted the ‘intellectual marginality of legal scholarship’.

Tushnet, supranote 26.

While much time has elapsed since Tushnet's contribution, it might be thought such concerns have diminished over time in light of increased cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral collaborative activity—the kind of step-change that grant funders, governments and higher education institutions have been strongly pushing for.

Gennetal., supranote 4; Michael Adler, Recognisingthe Problem: Socio-Legal Research Traininginthe UK (2007).

That ‘others’/‘outsiders’ exclude, ignore or perceive as wholly irrelevant the body of legal scholarly work has also troubled a range of U.K. authors. Echoing the U.S. literature, a recurring complaint is the lack of cross-disciplinary mutuality. While legal academics frequently turn to a multitude of other disciplines for inspiration, it is claimed that scholars from other disciplines are disinterested in legal academia.

Gerhard Anders, Law at Its Limits: Interdisciplinarity between Law and Anthropology, 47 J. Leg. Pluralism & Unofficial L. 411 (2015); Stephen Feldman, Can Law Be a Source of Insight for Other Academic Disciplines?, 8 Wash. U. Juris. Rev. 151 (2016); Gennetal., supranote 4.

In contrast with these accounts, Roger Cotterrell's evaluation is focused on the question of how legal scholarship (and at points, ‘law’ more generally), has come to be neglected by the social sciences.

Roger B. M. Cotterrell, Law and Sociology: Notes on the Constitution and Confrontations of Disciplines, 13 J. L. Soc’y 9 (1986).

The aim here is not to take issue with any of the substantive claims as to spaces and bodies of work where law and legal scholarship is suspiciously absent. Instead, our interest is in how the ‘other’ emerges in such accounts, and the extent to which these ‘others’, who purportedly disregard or neglect legal scholarship, are grounded in reality. The ‘other’ as s/he (or indeed they) emerges, seems to be exclusively based on assertion rather than based on empirical investigation. Whether invoked as thought experiment, assertion or narrated through anecdotal experience, none of these accounts aim to unravel or explore the truth of their assertions about how ‘others’ regard legal academia. Perhaps the constant repetition of these claims, through a range of literatures (often by individuals of high standing within legal studies) in the absence of competing accounts, helps to reinforce the idea that legal academia does indeed maintain a low standing in the eyes of others. Nevertheless, as noted above, the manner by which this putative ‘other’ is invoked, requires us to critically stand back from these claims. The first point to be made here is that the majority of these accounts present a homogenous external ‘other’—an actor, actors, a discipline, or perhaps the entire world, that comes to miscast, misrepresent, regard as irrelevant, or present in a negative light or one-dimensional way, legal academia. And while a number of authors point towards more specific populations (i.e. some ‘others’ rather than the entire ‘world’), there is still no consideration of how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ are likely, based on differing levels of interaction with the field, to regard it in different ways. It seems, we think, fairly implausible that all ‘others’ will come to view the field of legal academia through the same negative lens—even if one might suppose that some others might perceive legal scholarship in the way that these authors describe.

A second concern relates to the internal-facing nature of the accounts offered and the fleeting emergence of the ‘other’ in that context. There is no contemplation given as to how the very same concerns—being passed over or misunderstood by other disciplines,

Mallaband et al., supranote 11.

Overall, our evaluation of the literature suggests a strongly negative set of imaginaries held by legal academics, in terms of how they portray the ’outsiders’/‘other’ view of the field of legal academia. Yet insofar as the literature presents a fairly small population of legal thinkers, many of whom came to write on the topic decades ago, our benchmarking survey with legal academics at Cardiff University gives us the opportunity to identify whether these negative depictions continue to emerge in the legal academic community, and whether they are widely held amongst that population. So too are we able to investigate, even if only in a small way, how ‘outsiders’ within the university context do think about legal academia, and to explore the extent to which these might converge or diverge from the imaginaries emerging within the legal scholarship, and by legal scholars in our survey.

Perhaps the most obvious way of categorizing legal research approaches is to draw upon the traditional ‘black-letter law’

See Shane Kilcommins, Doctrinal Legal Method (Black-Letterism): Assumptions, Commitments and Shortcomings, in Legal Research Methods: Principlesand Practicalities (Laura Cahillane & Jennifer Schweppe eds., 2016).

Not all, however, would agree with such a definition. Smits for example claims that ‘the days of a purely doctrinal approach . . . if those times ever existed at all—are now far behind us’.

Smits, supranote 4, at 29.

The findings which led Cownie to depict the discipline as one that was in ‘transition’, as well as her findings in respect of how legal academics understood the labels of ‘black-letter law’ and ‘socio-legal studies’, prove particularly germane here. Asking interviewees to position their research and teaching according to a range of paradigm orientations on a scale—‘from doctrinal [generally referred to by academic lawyers as ‘black-letter’], through socio-legal studies to critical legal studies (CLS) and feminist’

Cownie, supranote 93, at 63.

Cownie observed that the fluidity of these research descriptors, in particular the conflation of ‘socio-legal’ with ‘empirical’, had ramifications for her impression of the field; conceivably, she noted, the community of socio-legal lawyers might well be larger than appeared on her data.

Id. at 58.

Of course, not all have quickly accepted these claims. Pointing to critique around this aspect of Cownie's methods and findings, in particular by virtue of the (nearly) catch-all definition afforded to ‘socio-legal studies’, Bartie argues that Cownie's assessment of the field can ‘be viewed as either an accurate reflection of movements in legal scholarship or as a form of advocacy’.

Bartie, supranote 4, at 356.

A range of alternative approaches can be identified for attempting to capture the different methodologies and methods deployed by legal academics in ways that move beyond the potentially troubled dichotomy of ‘black-letter law’ and ‘socio-legal studies’ in favour of a more granular approach. While there are some who rely on the ‘published discourse’ of the field,

See, e.g., Robert C. Ellickson, Trends in Legal Scholarship: A Statistical Study, 29 J. Legal Stud. 517 (2000). Ellickson's work in which is focused on achieving scope of capture (even if not depth) by deploying ‘words and phrases’ as proxies for different intellectual traditions. These proxies were used to search a Westlaw database to statistically map the rise and fall of different intellectual traditions in U.S. legal scholarship, including doctrinal approaches, law and economics, critical legal studies, postmodernism, feminist jurisprudence, empirical work, sociological approaches and a range of “law and . . .” approaches (history, psychology, philosophy and civic republicanism).

There are numerous merits to this approach, and it elegantly builds on previous attempts to map legal research. It provides a method that is capable of capturing the more dynamic and complex features of research profiles where scholars move between or across the categories of ‘black-letter law’ or ‘socio-legal’. In avoiding these terms explicitly, the approach squarely addresses Cownie's concern as to the “fluidity” that these terms could invite. Siems and Síthigh's approach can be commended for broader reasons. While others have attempted to identify patterns relating to different intellectual traditions (e.g. doctrinal, feminist, empirical etc.) using words and phrases as proxies to search across large databases of published legal scholarship,

See Ellickson, supranote 106.

While the authors note that the sample size is small (n = 17), overall it nevertheless lends further support for Cownie's finding

Cownie, supranote 3, at 58.

Figure 1

Given the aims of our survey, Siems and Síthigh's contribution struck us as particularly valuable for a further reason. As we have already highlighted, we sought to address quite distinct audiences, consisting not only of non-legal academics and legal academics, but also two specific legal academic sub-populations consisting of vocational legal scholars and academic legal scholars. The centralization of more generic typifications of how one goes about research or scholarly practice, which could then be translated into particular paradigm orientations (e.g. for Siems and Síthigh's purposes, ‘practical legal research, legal research as part of humanities, legal research as part of social sciences) would enable us to speak in a comprehensible way to all of our audiences but also elicit granular data around legal research and scholarly orientations.

While Siems and Síthigh's approach provides particular inspiration for the survey design and analytical approach we adopted in enquiring about legal research, we have also benefited from combining aspects of the approaches adopted by Cownie and Ellickson. For our survey design we embraced some of the categorizations offered by Ellickson as well as Siems and Síthigh in order to gain a more granular approach to research approaches which will make sense to ‘insiders’ and ‘others’/‘outsiders’. In addition, rather than asking survey respondents to pick between research orientations in binary fashion, we have used the ‘scaling’ approach that Siems and Síthigh introduce. Our aim has been to build overall individual research profiles, ones which can be subsequently analyzed to assess their key constituent elements and whether they are strongly orientated in one direction or another. The combination of these approaches served to provide a useful and accessible framework for online survey design that could be presented to different audiences, including those which might not be familiar with the concepts of ‘black-letter law’ or ‘socio-legal studies’. Nonetheless, as we detail in section three below, we reintroduce these concepts at a later stage, using these as crude analytical tools for evaluating the results in assessing the overall research orientations our respondents offer. Even if these concepts are ambiguous and political, they nevertheless connote meaning within the legal academic community and can give us a sense of the general orientation of the field.

We should note that we also introduced further categories for evaluating the legal academic terrain that supplemented these approaches. While Cownie found in her study that interdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinary collaborative work were not prevalent features of legal academia at that time, this is an aspect of the field that has been somewhat neglected since in terms of mapping exercises. Given that the ‘collaborative’ cross-disciplinary behaviors of legal academics, and perceptions others hold about legal academics constitute strong drivers for our overarching study, we included some soft measures around individualistic/collaborative approaches. Given space constraints, the results of this aspect of our study are reported elsewhere (See Priaulx et al., supranote 7).

Across the community of surveyed legal academics our findings reveal some commonalities in response around the attributes that ‘insider’ participants considered to best describe their own discipline. Of note, however, we also see some interesting points of contrast between the two populations inhabiting the Law Department. Potentially reflecting different paradigm orientations and distinctive everyday ‘business’, the most frequently selected descriptors for legal academia among VLS were Theoretical, Vocational, Academic, Practical and Reliant on Documents., with 66.7% selecting each of these attributes. Some convergence in view between VLS and ALSs can be identified on a number of these attributes (ALS: Theoretical (80%), Academic (80%) and Practical (75%). Nevertheless, on aggregate the ALS population, while selecting options across all of the descriptors, very strongly emphasised Interesting (90%), as well as Creative (70%), in contrast with VLS, of whom 16.7% and 33% selected those options. A majority of VLS selected Vocational and Reliant on Documents as attributes (66.7%), but while still featuring prominently, a comparatively smaller proportion of ALS selected these (45%). In addition, 55% of ALS typified the field as Empirical (in contrast with VLS: 16.7%) and 50% of ALS considered the discipline of law to be Innovative (in contrast with VLSs: 33.3%). In terms of the negative descriptors highlighted above, few selected these across the population of 26 legal academics: Arcane (VLS: 0%; ALS: 15%), Boring (VLS: 0%; ALS: 5%).

We note however, that in contrast with the ALS population, the VLS population sample size was small (6 survey respondents) and as such greater participation by this community in the survey may have led to very different results.

These depictions of the field also emerge within the narrative section of the survey. We included an optional question which invited legal academics to attempt to ‘describe law as an academic discipline to a non-legal academic interested in what kinds of research, scholarship and enquiries populate the discipline as a whole’. 18 of the 26 legal academics provided substantive responses to this.

With a further two providing text highlighting that they would either not attempt such a task, or that their response would depend on “who was asking”.

In contrast, another VLS respondent noted how the discipline as a whole “is hugely varied”, encompassing the “practical and the theoretical, the empirical and the procedural and more besides”. Nevertheless, the same respondent also noted some tension between different depictions of law as an academic discipline,

If I was being honest I would also tell the hypothetical non-legal academic that it's full of lack of understanding and distrust between those who view academic law as primarily a social science and those who view it as in part vocational

From the ALS respondents, one expressed uncertainty about the vocational orientation of the discipline, “I’m not sure that law as an academic discipline is ‘vocational’ (although it may be a vocation, and may be on vocational questions). . .” while another considered that the traditional vocational focus of the field “has had an impact on the kinds of research that have traditionally been pursued. . . often around analysing law. . . with a practical focus”. Nevertheless, the same respondent, akin to many other ALS contributors, did not see a tension between paradigm orientations, instead emphasising that the role of ‘socio-legal enquiry’ “broaden[s] the focus, by using social research methods and by looking at different aspects of ‘law in society’”. On these accounts, enquiry within the discipline of law, can embrace “both doctrinal and socio-legal scholarship”, be both “problem and solution orientated, with a deep concern for society and social relations”, with a strong orientation towards questions of “what the law should be” or “knowing how the law really works in practice”. One respondent highlighted that while the field appeared to be “increasingly fragmented”, it was perhaps held together by “a shared knowledge of the principles by which legal norms are (traditionally) created, identified and interpreted”.

Across the ALS population, the portrayal of law as an academic discipline was highly positive, and the sheer breadth and diversity of the work and approaches the field captures often underpinned this depiction, “An exciting set of varied engagements with law: some doctrinal, some philosophical, some critical, and characterized by a very high number of law-and subjects: law and geography; law and literature; law and anthropology etc.”, with another describing law as,

[A] muscular, interactive field full of surprising angles and unexpected convergences. It is a highly stimulating world to work in”

One respondent noted that “it would be sad to consider [the field of law] unscientific, but a broad definition of science is required!” and also added that “[c]learly it cannot be uncreative and boring. . .!”

Those ‘insider’ portrayals offer an interesting benchmark for evaluating non-legal academics’ responses. In respect of non-legal academics, while the population as a whole provided responses that span the full range of attributes, the most frequently selected were Academic (60.8%), Applied (54.9%), Reliant on Documents (46.1%), Interesting (45.1%) and Theoretical (43.1%). We see points of convergence between legal academics’ own description of the field and the selections made by non-legal academics (“non-law”) in respect of the frequency of selection of Theoretical, Academic and Reliant on Documents. We also see convergence between the ALS and non-legal academics, with both populations highlighting Interesting as a key attribute (non-law: 45.1%; ALS: 90%). Attributes attracting the lowest selection frequency by non-legal academics included Uncreative, Unscientific, Dealing in Pure Ideas, and Boring. Nevertheless, 54.9% of non-legal academics also selected Applied which was more strongly emphasised by ALSs (45%) than VLSs (33.3%). Across the population of non-legal academics as a whole, the mean number of attributes selected per survey respondent stood at 5.08, with none selecting above 16.

We also cross-referenced the responses of non-legal academics (‘outsiders’) with their self-reported frequency of interaction with legal academics to assess whether this factor might present different findings within that population. While this aspect of our study extends beyond the remit of the present article, and is discussed elsewhere,

See Priaulx et al., supranote 7.

As we discussed earlier, the literature reveals a variety of legal scholars that have asserted how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ perceive legal academia in a way that is persistently negative and homogeneous. While aware that we were inviting speculation, we also asked our legal academic survey population to undertake such an exercise. We asked them to select from the same list of 21 descriptors the attributes they believed non-legal academics might select in typifying legal academia. In respect of those surveyed, while the legal academics’ imaginaries often contrasted with how non-legal academics responded, we do see a number of points of alignment. Attributes frequently selected by legal academics in terms of how they imagined non-legal academic responses, included Theoretical (VLS: 83.3%; ALS: 40%)—an attribute which was in the top five of those selected by non-legal academics. In respect of Reliant on Documents, a large proportion of both parts of the law school (VLS: 83.3%; ALS: 80%) also anticipated this attribute as one that non-legal academics would likely select (non-legal: 41.6%), which also sat in the top five of attributes selected by non-legal academics in practice.

Nevertheless, for the greater part we see very different portrayals of legal academia emerging between the imaginaries of legal academics and how non-legal academics actually typified the field. In terms of Interesting, no VLS members anticipated that non-legal academics would select this attribute to describe legal academia. Only 10% of ALS imagined that non-legal academics would select this attribute—a factor also mirrored in the frequency of ALS respondents selecting Boring (60%) as an attribute that they imagined non-legal academics would select. In fact, only 6.9% of non-legal academics selected this attribute. While a high number of vocational lawyers and academic lawyers had selected Academic in terms of their ‘own’ perception of the discipline, when coming to imagine how outsiders might perceive law, this factor was far less pronounced (VLS: 16.7%; ALS: 25%). Legal academics’ perceptions were rather far off the mark on Unscientific. In practice, while a small percentage of legal academics had selected this item in terms of their ‘own’ assessment (VLS: 16.7%; ALS: 10%), 66.7% of VLS respondents imagined that non-legal academics would perceive legal academia this way, whilst 35% of ALS respondents shared this view. In practice, only 7.8% of non-legal academics made this assessment (with 11.8% of non-legal academics positively selecting Scientific). Again, in respect of the movement away from their self-assessment of the field of legal academia to how they imagine outsiders will portray the field, both vocational and academic lawyers downgraded Applied as a factor (VLS: 33.3% to 16.7%; ALS: 45% to 15%), whilst this was the second most popular descriptor selected by non-legal academics in practice (54.9%).

The overall mean of each legal academic group, ALS, and VLS, in respect of self-rating (‘my approach to research and scholarship’) is reflected below in Figure 4 as “ALS self” or “VLS self”, and the rating in respect of how ALS and VLS groups believe non-legal academics will respond when addressing such a question is detailed under “ALS Thinks Others”, and “VLS Thinks Others”, accordingly. The results present the overall means of these groups, as well as providing the minimum and maximum Research Profile Scores from each constituent group.

In respect of self-reports of ALS, the overall mean sits within “mixed” territory, but with a strong orientation towards socio-legal approaches, and to a lesser degree, a tendency to also draw on approaches associated black-letter law. 7 of the ALS survey participants had Research Profile Scores that were above 100, indicating profiles that are very strongly socio-legal, with very low scores on black-letter law factors (an overall black-letter mean score of 16). Nevertheless, for the remaining ALS population (n = 13) factors associated with black-letter law, Vocational or Descriptive, or both, most clearly have a place in their work (with a black-letter mean of 43). The maximum ALS Research Profile Score at 161, highlighted a profile composed of 85 Social Phenomena, 5 Vocational, 12 Descriptive, 80 Theoretical, 85 Normative, and 88 Empirical. At the minimum end, the lowest Research Profile Score recorded is −10.7. This was the only ALS score that dipped below 0, and the profile belonged to the only survey respondent on a teaching and scholarship contract in the ALS population. Such a finding appears to support the conclusions reached by Cownie, and Siems and Síthigh, to the extent that there would appear to be a strong prevalence of mixed approaches within the field of legal academia, with a strong socio-legal orientation.

Cownie, supranote 3; Siems & Síthigh, supranote 4.

In respect of the survey responses of VLS, the overall mean score demonstrates the opposite pattern, sitting firmly below zero, indicating a very strong orientation towards black-letter law factors. An overall Research Profile Score of zero, would typically indicate a profile composed of Vocational, Descriptive and Normative, whilst a score of −100 indicates a more “Professional Law” profile consisting exclusively of Vocational and Descriptive. In practice, 5 VLS Research Profile Scores sit below zero (−17, −23, −74, −91, and −100) indicating an orientation that ranges between black-letter law towards a more professionally distilled form of black-letter law. Out of the 6 VLS respondents, only one had a Research Profile Score above 0, sitting at 67.7 with a strongly mixed profile: 82 Social Phenomena, 96 Vocational, 82 Descriptive, 80 Theoretical, 80 Normative, and 68 Empirical. Overall, these findings align neatly with our expectation of the VLS population in light of contract type and professional orientation.

In the context of how legal academics ‘imagine’ others/outsiders will regard legal research, here we see particularly interesting results. The imaginaries of both ALS (n = 20) and VLS (n = 5)

Across other areas of the survey, we report 6 VLS survey respondents. The drop of 1 VLS participant here reflects that one of our VLS respondents that had provided a self-report of approaches to research and scholarship, and went onto complete the remainder of the survey, nevertheless selected ‘not applicable’ for all elements of this aspect of the survey. No explanation was given for this.

The overall scores of ALS and VLS populations highlight a belief that non-legal academic ‘others’/’outsiders’ will regard the field as consisting of a “mixed” terrain, rather than squarely ‘black-letter law’. However, as Figure 4 above shows, both the ALS and VLS populations anticipate that non-legal academics will nevertheless portray the research approaches in law very differently to how ALS and VLS populations themselves depict them. In common with our earlier finding, across both legal populations we see a combination of up- and down-grading from self-reported data that suggests that legal academics expect to see a strong divergence between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ perspectives. This pattern can be seen in Figure 5 below. Across both legal populations, we see significant movement away from self-assessments, with 17 survey respondents migrating on average 76 points towards or deeper into black-letter law territory, and 8 survey respondents moving on average 65.9 points towards or deeper into socio-legal territory. While we see movement across all categories (social phenomena, vocational etc.), the most significant changes can be seen in the stronger emphasis placed on black-letter law factors, Vocational and Descriptive, with some downgrading of other categories. Interestingly, the only factor that remains more or less stable is Normative.

Figure 5

Looking within the specific populations, we can potentially account for the strength of the overall pull towards black-letter law factors by virtue of the comparatively larger population of ALS. It is the majority of the ALS population that accounts for the strong migration towards black-letter law in their assessments (ALS constitute 16 of the 17 respondents that migrate in this direction). This particular population very strongly moves away from self-reported Research Profile Scores. While the overall mean for self-assessment Research Profile Scores falls squarely into ‘mixed’ territory, with a maximum sitting high in socio-legal and the lowest score sitting narrowly below zero, when it comes to imagining how others/outsiders might survey the field, the score lines shorten considerably so that profiles appear far less socio-legal (on average by 77.6 points). The overall imaginaries of the ALS population seem to suggest an expectation, on the part of the majority, that non-legal academics will see the field of law as extremely different to the approaches they take to their research. But, insofar as this suggests an expectation that ‘others’/‘outsiders’ will see it as more vocational and descriptive, this is a far cry from an expectation that non-legal academics will anticipate a field that is purely doctrinal. Instead, the overall results highlight an expectation that outsiders might see the field as largely mixed.

In turn, while a smaller population pull in the opposite direction, towards socio-legal factors, 8 of our legal academic survey participants made selections which demonstrated this trend. Here we see an even split between 4 VLS and the remaining 4 ALS (including 1 ALS on a teaching and scholarship contract, and another ALS that is recorded as a part-time tutor). While the VLS population is small, those migrating towards a more socio-legal depiction are far more pronounced with a very strong shift away from self-reported Research Profiles (VLS: an average of 89.2 point rise). In respect of the 4 ALS participants who anticipate a more socio-legal depiction, we see a 42.5 point rise.

The general pattern across the populations of VLS and ALS is highly consistent; a series of imaginaries that others/outsiders will categorise the field in ways that are at odds with own approaches. Certainly, for the ALS population, this maps to some degree onto our earlier findings of a tendency towards pessimism in respect of how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ think. Nevertheless, this is far less marked, and the overall results provide a series of legal academic voices which sit at odds with those in the legal scholarly literature. Moreover, even if the overall trend highlights that the ALS community in particular hold an expectation that ‘others’/‘outsiders’ will regard the field in a way that is more vocational or descriptive in orientation, there are exceptions to this. We noted a number of exceptions earlier, in respect of two ALS survey participants on non-typical contract types (teaching and scholarship and part-time casual tutor) who migrate away from their own research profiles towards a stronger socio-legal depiction when imagining the responses of non-legal academics (from Research Profile Score of 37 to 69, and −11 to 76 respectively). However, two further ALSs also shifted higher up the socio-legal scale, highlighting a perception that others/outsiders might imagine the field to be slightly more typified by socio-legal approaches than was the case with their own research depictions (migrating from 40 to 65, and 73 to 100 respectively).

While we have cross-linked all profile responses with a range of separate markers around cross-disciplinary collaboration, we found no particular pattern emerged between those that migrated from one Research Profile Orientation to another. Nevertheless, what we did find is that these 2 ALS respondents were among 8 out of the entire cohort of legal academics (n = 25) that had high cross-disciplinary collaborative scores, and consistently reported this orientation across the survey. Nevertheless, to assess the extent to which higher levels of collaboration might provide greater insight into the beliefs of others, would require far more detailed questioning than our survey set out to achieve.

Central to the present article has been the insider imaginaries of legal academics about how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ will perceive the field of legal academia. As we noted at the outset, this was a theme which emerged from our evaluation of the legal literature and the results of the benchmarking surveys from our scoping study at Cardiff Law. Our key aim in the scoping study as a whole was to explore how non-legal academics conceptualized legal academia, their attitudes towards and insight into the field. While the results of our main survey are discussed extensively elsewhere,

Priaulx et al., supranote 7.

A key reason for this is by virtue of how some of our results from the non-legal academic survey responses appear to disrupt the imaginaries that we have noted throughout this paper. What is particularly disrupted is the view maintained within legal scholarship around how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ regard the field. In particular, the assumption that ‘others’/‘outsiders’ will perceive the field of legal academia in a negative light, and as largely doctrinal, unempirical, untheoretical etc. is one that appears to be countered by the survey responses from non-legal academics. We earlier highlighted how our survey findings around field wide descriptions (e.g. interesting, boring, academic, unacademic etc.) suggested a more positive portrayal of the field on the part of ‘others’/’outsiders’ than the imaginaries of legal academics surveyed. In similar force we find points of non-alignment between legal academics’ imaginaries on the benchmark survey and the survey responses of non-legal academic population in respect of depictions of approaches to legal research.

The results on approaches to legal research as reported in the main survey, and as highlighted below in in Figures 6 and 7, organize the non-legal academic survey Research Profile scores by interaction. This used the frequency of self-reported interaction with legal academics across a range of settings (e.g. teaching, supervision, workshops, research etc.) as a vehicle for evaluating whether the extent of interaction with legal scholars and researchers might make a difference to their responses. While this is discussed elsewhere at greater length,

Id.

Figure 6

Figure 7

Note that in Figures 6 and 7 below, the ‘Survey Respondent Populations’ highlighted as No interaction, Low interactors, Medium Interactors and High Interactors, all belong to the non-legal academic group of survey respondents.

When we focus on the legal academic respondents in our survey, a slightly more nuanced and less extreme series of imaginaries emerge—most certainly ones which sit at odds with the imaginaries profiled in legal scholarship. While the minimum scores among both the ALS and VLS populations suggest imaginaries that non-legal academics are likely to regard the field of legal academia as bordering on ‘purely black-letter law’ in approach (with the ALS group anticipating this to an even stronger degree with a Research Profile minimum score of −91), the mean scores of both the ALS and VLS groups both appear to suggest an expectation that ‘others’/‘outsiders’ will regard the field as more mixed in practice. While the VLS group self-reports a more black-letter law orientation, the imaginaries as to how others/outsiders are likely to regard the field of legal academia shifts in the opposite direction—with a mean that anticipates that ‘others’/’outsiders’ are likely to perceive the field as more mixed in practice (and at odds with the approaches VLS take to their own work). In contrast, while the ALS group self-reported mean sits high on the socio-legal spectrum, and this drops significantly when imagining the responses of ‘others’/‘outsiders’, there would appear to be an expectation that others will anticipate the field to be populated by more mixed legal research approaches in practice. On the basis of the mean scores however, the ALS imaginaries do tug the hardest towards the black-letter law end of the spectrum.

Overall then, we find a series of responses around research approaches that diverge quite significantly from the imaginaries within legal scholarship as to how ‘others’/‘outsiders’ will perceive the field of legal academia; this is not only by virtue of how our non-legal academic population responded, but also the imaginaries provided by legal academics themselves. What we do find, however, is that even if legal academics imaginaries suggest an expectation that ‘others’/‘outsiders’ are unlikely, on the balance, to depict the field as starkly ‘black-letter law’, the difference between self-reported approaches to research and scholarship highlights an expectation that how others will regard legal research will be rather different (i.e. more dominated by black-letter law approaches or socio-legal approaches) to how legal academics go about their own research in practice.

While our surveys highlight pessimism within the legal academic community at Cardiff University about how others/outsiders might perceive the field at the point of field-wide description, with an expectation that others will see legal academia as unacademic, untheoretical, purely doctrinal, unapplied, non-empirical or indeed, boring—the results from the imaginaries in respect of research approaches, suggest less pessimism. While there is an expectation that non-legal academics/‘others’ might perceive the field in ways that are distinctive from the self-perceptions of legal academics themselves in terms of approaches to legal research, the overall results do not suggest that legal academics expect ‘others’ to regard the field as purely black-letter law. Perhaps there is now an emerging sense, at least amongst this community of legal academics, that the field of law is now far more strongly integrated within the academy so that it would be inconceivable that academics in other parts of the University could come to imagine the discipline in the particularly stark and harsh terms that legal scholarship has portrayed.