2 - What Can Law Schools Offer Other Disciplines?

Summary

This chapter, stimulated by Professor Bell’s contribution to legal education (as well as to comparative law and legal reasoning), tackles the question of whether traditional doctrinal law has anything to offer, intellectually, to disciplines outside law. That is to say, does law export knowledge to other disciplines or does it just import knowledge? Despite John Bell’s positive agenda asserted some eighteen or so years ago, this examination presents a gloomy picture. This is not to argue that law faculties are making no contributions to the Academy in general – indeed, the opposite is true. But such contributions are largely founded on knowledge imported into law faculties. Comparative lawyers, or some of them such as Professor Bell, offer some hope.