News

A Lawyer Looks at the Humanities

11 December 2009

Source:	HRN

Professor John Burrows QC is a trustee of the Council for the Humanities and a Fellow of the New Zealand Academy of the Humanities-Aronui. He gave an excellent address about his experiences and observations of the humanities at the 2009 New Zealand Academy for the Humanities 2009 awards last month.

The following is a summarised version of John's observations.

A lawyer looks at the Humanities

There are still people who needs to be persuaded that the humanities are useful. These are some ways in which they have been useful to me as a lawyer and to the law itself.

Firstly, they can provide context. In the past the narrow legal training that lawyers received could lead them to ignore the context in which the law operates.

• Lawyers and judges interpreting Acts of Parliament sometimes took such a literal approach to the words used that they ignored the very purpose of the Act. The printed words and the page of the Act were studied in isolation and to the exclusion of everything else.

• Sometimes committees of lawyers, in recommending changes to the law, failed to take into account in wider implications of the measures they were recommending.

Things have moved on. Now days when judges interpret Acts of Parliament they are ready to look at the surrounding context. Usually this is done via reference to the Parliamentary debates when the bill was going through Parliament. But sometimes scholarly works are referred to. This happened in the famous Maori Council case in 1987. When the judges are advancing the common law they also sometimes refer to humanities scholarship: they have done so in many cases on privacy and defamation where even John Stuart Mill and John Milton were cited.

Enter the humanities!

The old law reform committees no longer exist. The Law Commission, which now recommends law reform takes a broad approach, and takes into account social, historical and economic considerations. In it's review of privacy, for example, it has has to consider what privacy is (a philosophical question); the effects invasion of privacy have on people; the history of privacy protection; whether different cultures have different approaches to privacy. The humanities are central to these inquiries. The Law Commission in its reports cites many works by philosophers, ethicists, and others. So this is the humanities supplying context.

Secondly the humanities can give exposure to different ways of thinking and of approaching problems. Every discipline trains the mind in a particular way. A lawyer's mind has its own characteristics. It pays close attention to the text (even today); it draws fine distinctions; it tries to anticipate problems. For many years I taught media law in [University of] Canterbury's Diploma of Journalism course. The students were very bright graduates from many disciplines, mostly humanities disciplines. They thought differently from me: They looked to common theme and workability rather than concentrating on the words of a text as I might do: They taught me to ask, much more than I had in the past, they question of why.

Thirdly the humanities can provide useful analogies It is always illuminating for a person from one discipline grappling with a particular problem to see someone from another discipline facing the same, or a very similar problem. I have long been interested in statutory interpretation and have contemplated thorny questions such as how to reconcile the intention of the author of a document with the meaning a desire would most naturally derive from it; and how to best interpret an old text to do useful things in a modern world. Your literary theorists and linguistic philosophers grapple with exactly these questions. Their ways of tackling them opened up new arenas of enquiry for me.

So, contact with the humanities bring much benefit to the law. It provides context, both past and present; greater understanding of the effects of the law; and new ways of looking at problems. But if this is true of the law, must it also be true of other disciplines? All disciplines, even different disciplines within the humanities, train the mind in a particular way: they can benefit from seeing how others approach problems. More importantly, virtually all disciplines in the end effect human behavior. Practitioners in all these disciplines benefit from the study of the human effects of what they are doing.

• A business trading with an oversees country benefits from knowing – indeed, needs to know – the culture and language of the people and their country.
• Scientific and technological discovery obviously has implications for humankind: how could it be otherwise? The galloping advance of information technology raises legal and ethical issues impacting on privacy. A recent study based at the University of Otago involved scientists engaged in the human genome technology working with lawyers and ethicists: the study examined the implications for privacy, ethics and cultural differences.

So interdisciplinary study is critically important and the humanities need to be a part of it. Government and funds agencies are now seeing things in interdisciplinary terms. More research now is problem-based rather than disciplinary based. But even now the contribution the humanities can make, is sometimes underrated or even forgotten.

Interdisciplinary study is needed, but let me enter three cautions.

• Working with other disciplines should never lead us to compromise or dilute our own discipline. We each make our own contribution by bringing our own disciplinary training to bear. It is at the intersection of the two strong disciplines where innovation can happen.
• Interdisciplinary study should not be thought to be easy. I can never be an expert in someone else's discipline. I need to work with an expert in that discipline. There needs to be teamwork. Even this can be difficult if it is not properly managed. People can end up talking past each other if their casts of mind, their knowledge base, and their language, are different. Sometimes the result of interdisciplinary research ends up in a book where one discipline write half the chapters and the other discipline the other half with no connection between them. This is not without value, but more is needed. Managing interdisciplinary research is a skill in itself.
• In advancing the (undoubted) value of the humanities to interdisciplinary study, we must speak in language that our wider audience can understand, and not in the sophisticated conceptual language which we might use at a subject conference.

Keep it plain and simple.

Image: "Inventing" (CC-BY-NC) courtesy of “DailyPic”