‘More legal theory than I thought’: Robert Sharpe and legal scholarship

A reading of Robert Sharpe’s Habeas Corpus (1976) is an occasion for reflection on the relationship between doctrinal legal scholarship and legal theory. Legal doctrine, as stated in works of legal doctrinal scholarship, is the thing that legal theory (in its many different forms) is supposed to give an account of, and the ambition of legal doctrinal scholarship – to state the law – is impossible without a normative orientation of the kind that at least implicitly amounts to a legal-theoretical position. In Habeas Corpus, a work of legal-doctrinal scholarship, Sharpe does not hesitate to identify some parts of the law as incorrect, even ‘intolerable,’ in light of the law’s normative orientation toward human freedom. The doctrinal project of stating the law is inseparable from the theoretical project of making sense of it.