Law Publishing and Legal Scholarship in the United Kingdom

Extract

This paper is essentially an abridged version of the Final Report of the Society of Public Teacher's of Law (S.P.T.L.) Working Party on Law Publishing, presented in August 1977. The Working Party was established in May 1974 with the following terms of reference, “To investigate the problems of law publishing as they bear on legal scholarship and legal research and to make recommendations”, and its aim was to represent the interests of teachers, students, researchers and authors concerned with all levels of academic law in the British Isles. Although our findings are not specifically related to the task of the law librarian I hope that members of the International Association of Law Libraries will be interested in this view of law publishing from the perspective of the legal academic profession. It should be made clear that this study was not conceived of as a project of pure academic research into the British law book trade, rather, as the tenor of the paper will reveal, its purpose was to stimulate a greater awareness of the problems facing publishers, authors and educators and to define some possible strategies for the different groups concerned. The Working Party has therefore seen its role as twofold. Its first function was to investigate and analyse the current situation in law publishing in the light of the problem created by inflation. It was felt that rising costs and prices were likely to have a serious effect on publication of some important types of scholary and educational material which were not immediately commercially attractive and also on levels of provision of books and other material in libraries and for students generally. Information was sought by questionnaire, correspondence and interview from different groups involved in the production and consumption of academic legal literature (publishers, periodical editors, librarians and lecturers) and from other bodies and individuals concerned with the general problems of academic publishing. In the course of our investigations it became apparent that the Working Party could perform a number of useful functions beyond that of pure research. In the final year of its existence it has, therefore, adopted a slightly more active policy. It has seen its second function as that of stimulating activity on the problems themselves, through advice to the academic legal community on the publication of their work, through encouragement of further research projects in specific areas and through discussion with publishers, editors and others involved in the production of legal material. Its advisory role is reflected in the series of separate working papers on aspects of law publishing and production of materials.