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Introduction to the symposium in honour of William Twining

William Twining has been (still is, in my view) the most influential figure in British legal education over the last half-century. He is erudite and prolific, of course; his range is impressive and his insights profound; he writes with great style and good humour; he has lectured, consulted and published his way across the academic alphabet from the ANU to Yale (but not, I think, Zimbabwe); his students serve with distinction and profit as judges, lawyers and law teachers in Africa, America, Asia and continental Europe, as well as the United Kingdom. These are all reasons to warrant celebrating William’s achievements in an international journal devoted to the legal profession. But they do not tell us what makes his contributions so compelling, what infuses them with their special energy and insight. In my view, the answer is that William astutely and creatively explores the tensions between the centre and the periphery of legal education and scholarship. I mean ‘periphery’ and ‘centre’ partly in the physical sense. William was born on the periphery of empire, in Kampala, and began his academic career in the late 1950s in Khartoum. One of his students there famously drew his attention to the oddity of incarcerating camels in the zoo of the imperial metropolis. From that early encounter in a colonial classroom ultimately emerged the ‘law in context’ tendency in legal education and scholarship which, not by accident, became most firmly ensconced at Warwick Law School, then a new institution on the periphery of the British legal academy. William himself duly arrived at Warwick after service in other outposts of the imperium – first Dar es Salaam (where, perhaps foolishly, I declined a job offer from the same man that hired him – the brilliant and erratic A.B. Weston) and then Queen’s Belfast (whence he dispatched Pericles in search of a plumber, and sent myself, and my generation of Canadian law teachers, in search of our better angels). With his move to Bentham House – home of the Faculty of Law of University College London – William relocated to the physical centre of English law. In short order, he became the kindly warder at the centre of Blackstone’s Tower, the legal academy’s panopticon. True, he did teach the inmates how to pick oakum (or, as INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION, VOL. 18, NOS. 1–2, MARCH–JULY 2011