Priaulx, Nicolette ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4210-1980, Weinel, Martin, Leonard-Clarke, Willow and Hayes, Thomas ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1141-923X 2020. Fear and loathing in legal academia: Legal academics’ perceptions of their field and their curious imaginaries of how ‘outsiders’ perceive it. British Journal of American Legal Studies 9 (1) , pp. 17-80. 10.2478/bjals-2020-0006 |
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Abstract
This paper concerns the question of how legal academics think 'others' think about legal academia. Centralising our empirical work undertaken at a UK research intensive University which explored the attitudes, beliefs and knowledges of non-legal academics about the field of legal academia, we focus on the findings flowing from benchmarking surveys with legal academics which invited self-evaluations of the field of legal academia as well as imagining how non-legal academics might evaluate the field of legal academia. Of particular interest here, we note the presence of a curious divergence between self-perceptions of legal academia and their ‘imaginaries’ as to how others will perceive the field. Supported by a review of the legal scholarly literature, our study reveals a persistently bleak ‘folklore’ surrounding the question of how “others” will regard our field – though critically, one which on the basis of our empirical work, finds little root in reality. Providing the first study of its kind, and offering a range of novel analytical techniques, we highlight the significant purchase of empirical meta-disciplinary work of this kind for better understanding our field, and its relationship with wider spheres. While undertaken as a scoping study, we identify important potential pathways for raising the profile of legal academia and legal research in the wider academy and social sphere; quite critically, as we argue by reference to our findings, part of that work may simply involve legal academics projecting their more positive self-perceptions of their field and the value of their work to the outside world.
Item Type: | Article |
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Date Type: | Published Online |
Status: | Published |
Schools: | Cardiff Law & Politics Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education) Law Centre for the Study of Knowledge Expertise and Science (KES) |
Subjects: | H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HM Sociology K Law > K Law (General) |
Additional Information: | This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. BY-NC-ND 3.0. |
ISSN: | 2049-4092 |
Funders: | British Academy (Grant number 509225). |
Date of First Compliant Deposit: | 8 July 2019 |
Date of Acceptance: | 30 June 2019 |
Last Modified: | 08 May 2023 22:57 |
URI: | https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/124028 |
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