The Birth of An Academic Religion

 

 

Under the U.K.’s Research Excellence Framework, “each individual academic must generate something groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting and world-leading at least once every 15 months. The simplest method for doing that are either to criticise the most recent judgments to emit from the courts, or [to] subscribe to one of the academic cults which advance a particular worldview (autopoietic theory, legal positivism and restitutionism are examples). A good academic, on this model, should never praise judgments—because there is no research glory in simply repeating what other people have said. There is no evidence of an acute intellect in simply acknowledging that someone else has done a perfectly reasonable job in resolving a dispute. To be a top-flight academic, it is said by some, you must criticise, critique and carp. And when you have reached the top of the pile you may choose to lose your head and advance a model or try to establish a religion of your own.

Just such a thing happened at the University of Oxford during the 1980s and thereafter. A new religion was born: the law of restitution. Its prophet was [the late] Professor Peter Birks . . . .

This new theory about the organisation of English private law gave birth to a forest of doctoral theses, to a range of new textbooks, and even to an academic journal, the Restitution Law Review. This was perfect for academics because it gave them a belief system with which to attack every judgment which had ever been delivered in a court of equity and it also gave them a seed bed in which they could grow their precious, career-cultivating research projects. It allowed them to criticise judgments and to subscribe to an academic religion. The ‘restitutionists’—that is, the acolytes of this new religion at the University of Oxford—were iconoclastically dismissive of the old ways of doing law and equity, they were evangelical, and they were passionate.

The above is an extract from: Alastair Hudson, Equity and Trusts (10th edn, Routledge 2022) 1094–95.

Seth Barrett Tillman, ‘The Birth of an Academic Religion,’ New Reform Club (Aug. 29, 2024, 5:00 PM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-birth-of-academic-religion.html>;