Fear and loathing in legal academia: Legal academics’ perceptions of their field and their curious imaginaries of how ‘outsiders’ perceive it

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
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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