Changing times for built environment legal scholarship

Citation

Chynoweth, P. (2007), "Changing times for built environment legal scholarship", Structural Survey, Vol. 25 No. 3/4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ss.2007.11025caa.001

Changing times for built environment legal scholarship

This special double issue of Structural Survey presents a cross-section of the legal research that is currently being undertaken in the built environment academic community. Its publication is timely. Legal academics within the built environment field have been slow to assert the value of their contributions in a research context and have often been overshadowed by their colleagues in the management, economics and (to a lesser extent) technology subject areas. There are signs that this is changing and that legal research is now willing to play as prominent a role in the built environment academic project as law teaching has always done.

This is evident in the recent emergence of an identifiable academic legal community within the field (for example through the Built Environment Law Network; see www.bel-net.org) and in the recent formation of law subject groupings within the established built environment research organisations. Most recently the legal groupings within the European Network for Housing Research (ENHR) and Global Planning Education Association Network (GPEAN) have been joined by Working Commission W113 on Law and Dispute Resolution, within the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction (CIB).

The emergence of recognised groups of legal scholars within the built environment has been accompanied by a plethora of opportunities for conference attendance and a corresponding avalanche of published outputs, both in conference proceedings and in peer-reviewed journals. Many legal scholars who had previously felt themselves confined to teaching duties within their respective institutions are therefore now contributing to the built environment research agenda with corresponding benefits for the field as a whole. The hope is that these developments, which include the publication of this Special Issue, will now encourage other legal scholars in the field to play a full and active role in its research activities.

One of the priorities for this new academic community is to communicate its purpose, norms, values and methodologies to the wider built environment research community within which it resides. As individuals, legal researchers have perhaps been slow to do this in the past, with consequent misunderstandings and setbacks for their own research efforts. Many legal scholars within the field therefore report unhappy experiences of peer review at the hands of colleagues with no previous exposure to the particular features of legal scholarship.

It is therefore hoped that the new community will spend some time reflecting on what it regards as credible academic legal research in the built environment and that it will then communicate its conclusions to colleagues in other subject areas. Although these issues have recently been explored in detail elsewhere (Chynoweth, 2007), some aspects should briefly be mentioned here.

Crucially, the charge, often made by scholars within the sciences, that legal scholarship is “not research” must be responded to. A central feature of this response must involve an articulation of the epistemological nature of doctrinal (or “black-letter”) scholarship, and about how it differs from empirical and theoretical work. The purpose and rationale of doctrinal scholarship must also be explained. Although familiar to scholars within a legal academic community many built environment scholars express surprise that it constitutes an academic exercise at all. After all, they surmise, if one wants to know what the law is in a particular situation, why not just instruct a lawyer?

The related issue of when doctrinal scholarship can be legitimately described as research, as opposed to a text book, or teaching or CPD contribution, must also be addressed by the new community, which must also be prepared to make some hard choices in this area. Whilst the empiricists’ taunt that “doctrinal work is not research” is clearly wrong, the defensive response that “all doctrinal work is research” can only harm the credibility of legal scholarship in the medium to long term.

Finally, in an interdisciplinary field which is dominated by scientific practices and assumptions, some thought must be given to the methodology of legal scholarship. In the sciences academic credibility often hinges on the methodological approach, and it would be almost unthinkable that this aspect would be omitted from a published research output. Many scholars within the built environment share similar assumptions and, as many legal scholars have found to their cost, give short shrift to otherwise exemplary legal scholarship for the want of this missing ingredient.

The interdisciplinary nature of the field means that it is not enough for legal scholars to dismiss these events as the actions of unenlightened colleagues. If they wish to participate in the wider built environment academic community it is surely incumbent on them to explain their methods to those from different academic traditions? This might involve either an explanation of the methodological approach that they have chosen to adopt, or a clear explanation of why this is not appropriate in a piece of legal research. In reality this will be difficult to achieve until the community as a whole has reflected on its own established practices, and collectively learned to describe these in terms that are familiar to colleagues in the other built environment subject areas.

The contributions in this Special Issue adopt a variety of methodological approaches and examples will be found within them of doctrinal, theoretical, empirical, historical and comparative approaches as well, of course, as a variety of combinations of these. The articles address a wide range of traditional legal subject areas including property law, construction law, housing law, regulatory frameworks, IT law, historic buildings legislation and legal education. Their uniqueness, however, lies in the legal contribution that each of them make in addressing the problems and challenges of the built environment, in addition, of course, to the development of legal knowledge within their particular legal specialism.

Finally, a particularly welcome feature of this collection of articles is that they have been contributed by authors from seven different countries. This is indeed a clear indication that legal scholarship in the built environment has broadened its traditional perspectives and that it is now much more integrated into the field’s aspirations and research agendas than has traditionally been the case.

Paul ChynowethUniversity of Salford, Salford, UK, p.chynoweth@salford.ac.uk