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The Law Teacher

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A.T.H. Smith, Glanville Williams:

Learning the Law
a b
Prince Moses George Duku & Jessica Guth
a
Principal Partner at M.G. Duku & Associates, Nigeria
b
Bradford University Law School
Published online: 31 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Prince Moses George Duku & Jessica Guth (2014) A.T.H.
Smith, Glanville Williams: Learning the Law, The Law Teacher, 48:1, 133-135, DOI:
10.1080/03069400.2013.875699

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03069400.2013.875699

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 The Law Teacher 133
the last minute. The idea of a revision guide is to aid in exams by providing the
key facts rather than going into too much detail.
In conclusion therefore, we think that the Nutshells and Nutcases series has
the right level of information included for an exam-focused revision guide but
that the information needs presenting and structuring in a different way – a
way which acknowledges that what we want at this stage is bite size informa-
tion which is easily memorised. We realise that the issues we raise here reflect
our learning preferences and may differ from other students’ preferences. As
each student’s learning process is different, others may consider the existence
of handy hints unnecessary and the longer paragraphs ideal.
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 02:22 04 November 2014

Marilyna Vrontza, Tahmina Begum and Sanna Azar

Bradford University Law School
M.E.Vrontza@student.bradford.ac.uk
© 2014, Marilyna Vrontza, Tahmina Begum and Sanna Azar
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03069400.2013.875700

Glanville Williams: Learning the Law, by A.T.H. Smith, London, Sweet &
Maxwell, 15th edition, 2013, 290 pp., £19.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-414-
02823-4

The first and major pull for me to review this book is that it underscores the
reason I came to the UK to study law, which is rooted in an investigative drive
for legal knowledge, targeted at two ends: first, a better understanding of the
dialectics of British colonial intervention and effects of the introduction of the
British common law legal system in Nigeria; and, second, the hope that the
benefit of my successful academic legal training in England would be useful for
me to meaningfully contribute more balanced legal perspectives to transfor-
mative governmental administration, when I returned to Nigeria.
A second reason for my choice of book has to do with a reasoned response
to one of my questions during a lecture in which it was stated that the
(customary) laws of some other jurisdictions may not be considered law at all.
Fundamentally therefore, I take issue with the words “the Law” in the title. I
believe it to be the defining cultural and political directional compass guiding
the entire thesis of the author: that the English law is the philosophical electro-
magnet to which all laws and knowledge of law should gravitate. A.T.H. Smith
seeks to master and, perhaps, push the English law as a global common, a
thinking akin to the political-economic philosophy that inspires and drives
colonialism.
Having so stated in his preface to the book, his content becomes tenden-
tiously English in value and vision. Indeed, the author gets quite succinct in his
bias when he submits pointedly, for instance, that “Equity is law in the sense
that it is part of the law of England …” (p. 23). I respectfully think that equity
 134 Learning Resources Reviews
(which may go by other nomenclatures in other jurisdictions) is law because of
its ethical substance for justice and not because of its admirable documenta-
tion in the geographical expression called England in the UK. Furthermore,
from the author’s “Divisions of the law” (pp. 1–25) there is conspicuously absent
any discussion of another jurisdiction, except the English legal system.
Chapter 2 of the book, which touches on the mechanism of scholarship,
referring specifically to “pronouncing case names”, appears to be more of a
“civilizing” mission by the author than a basic requirement of legal training. He
does not accommodate the idiolectic inflections of those people who are not
English. My former President, General Yakubu Gowon, came to the military
academy in England with that name, and went back home to Nigeria renamed
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“Jack” Gowon because his English instructors thought “Jack” was better suited
to the general idiolectic expression of the English. The idea, therefore, that to
learn the law, one has to learn how to appropriately pronounce English case
names, for instance, appears to be uncritically prescriptive. I think the knowl-
edge of English case law to the culturally foreign student of English law has
more to do with the logical coherence of presenting precedence within the
context of the ordinate and subordinate jurisdictions of the courts of the
common law legal system, rather than the perfection of diction in properly
pronouncing English case names, which may bear no relevance to lingual
usages in non-English legal systems.
In Chapter 3 of the text, speaking on the European Union and its Parliament,
the author heightens his poignant Anglocentric cultural theme, submitting that
“the European Parliament … is not at all like the mother of Parliaments at
Westminster” (p. 55). The rest of the text, ranging from its prescribed methods
of study through technical terms, case law technique, interpretation of statute,
working out problems, writing exams, moot and mock trials, legal research, and
legal practice, maintains Smith’s English legal doctrines.
Strategically and historically, I note that the title first appeared in 1945, a
heated time for much self-determination conflicts within Britain’s overseas
colonies, which needed to be pacified by propaganda and publicity. The title
remains unchanged in 2013. Could A.T.H. Smith, therefore, be sustaining the
title due to a rueful colonial nostalgia, making him a continuing advocate of J.H.
Baker’s recollection that: “When in 1470, an English serjeant-at-law maintained
that the common law had been in existence since the creation of the world, it is
not improbable that he believed literally?”1
The summary of A.T.H. Smith’s thesis seems to be that jurisdictions such as
mine (Nigeria) should learn the law from England. He assumes that our home-
grown laws are, at best substandard, and at worse, not laws. It is, however, my
thinking that if other jurisdictions must learn “the law” from England, then
Smith must first do a sociological analysis of such societies in order to expunge
from the exportable English law such aspects as are empirically dead on arrival

1
J.H. Baker, Introduction to English Legal History (London, Butterworths, 2002) at p. 1.
 The Law Teacher 135
at such societies. In other words, cultural context must be taken into considera-
tion for law to be in any way meaningful.
A more appropriate approach can be found in Cownie and Bradney’s book,
English Legal System in Context, the 6th edition of which was published by
Oxford University Press in 2013.2 Beyond their title, I also find profoundly
intellectually invigorating their thesis that: “Law is an Argument not a state-
ment … It is not a fact to be learnt … it is something to be debated and
discussed” (at p. vii). Taken in the proper cultural context, the English law is a
rich and worthy history in itself. It certainly can do without a not very altruistic
mercantilist intellectualism. There is, indeed, a lot to be learnt by most jurisdic-
tions (including mine) from English law but definitely not a wholesale prescrip-
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tion of all of its power and culture within a context of a leviathan.

A.T.H. Smith’s Glanville Williams: Learning the Law needs to be retitled
“Learning the English Law” to reflect law’s more realistic post-colonial and
cultural relativity as opposed to (as Learning the Law suggests) a British pre-
scription of the Law. Smith, as it is, sacrifices the philosophical requirement for
academic objectivity on the altar of colonial but unrealistic nostalgia. That does
a form of hedonistic “violence” to the kernel and liberty of intellectual engage-
ment and the book should be recommended only in its proper context with
proper instruction.

Prince Moses George Duku

Principal Partner at M.G. Duku & Associates, Nigeria
with Jessica Guth
Bradford University Law School
j.guth@bradford.ac.uk
© 2014, Moses George Duku and Jessica Guth
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03069400.2013.875699

2
F. Cownie, A. Bradney and M. Burton, English Legal System in Context (Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2013).