Fear and Loathing in Legal Academia: Legal Academics’ Perceptions of Their Field and Their Curious Imaginaries of How ‘Outsiders’ Perceive It

This article concerns the question of how legal academics imagine ‘outsiders’ perceive 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 (’outsiders’) might evaluate the field of legal academia. Of particular interest, we note the presence of a curious divergence between self-perceptions of legal academia and their ‘imaginaries’ as to how ’outsiders’ 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 ‘outsiders’ will regard legal academia – 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 nature for better understanding legal academia and its relationship with other fields. While undertaken as a scoping study, we identify potential opportunities for raising the profile of legal academia in wider spheres, as well as enhancing opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration. 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.