1 - Introduction: the story of a project

Summary

Once upon a time a jurist in mid-career decided that the time had come to test and explore the implications and applications of some of his more general ideas at less abstract levels. The starting-point was an interest in ‘broadening the study of law from within’ as part of a conception of the discipline of law as an intellectual activity primarily concerned with the creation and dissemination of knowledge and critical understanding within ‘legal culture’.

The first step was to select a traditional field that seemed ripe for rethinking. There were several candidates. Torts, which he had taught for several years and which was in process of being deconstructed and redistributed; Contract, which was coming to be perceived almost as the paradigm or test case of legal scholarship; Land Law, on which several colleagues had done some promising ground-clearing work without having yet established a clear path out of the thickets of feudal arrangements and medieval doctrine; and Evidence, which had some intriguing ancestors in Bentham, Wigmore, Thayer and Frank, but which seemed to have been going through a somewhat stagnant phase in recent years.

The choice of Evidence was sealed by an epiphanic moment. In 1972, during a heated debate about proposed reforms of Criminal Evidence, Sir Rupert Cross, the leading English evidence scholar of the post-war era said: ‘I am working for the day when my subject is abolished.’ This was provocative at several levels.