Albert Venn Dicey y la Escuela de Derecho de Oxford (1835-1922)

Abstract

Albert Venn Dicey occupies a prominent place in English law at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. It has been said that he set the tone for the teaching of British constitutional law. He was Viner Professor of English Law at the University of Oxford. The biographies criticised in this research (Cosgrove, Walters) highlight a well-known methodological aspect. One cannot write a biography of a jurist without considering the context in which he lived, the university curricula and the strategies for legitimising the professional group to which he belonged. The circumstances of each period conditioned the choice of one theoretical framework or another. A legal science with an a priori and strictly logical approach could be replaced by a more empirical, pragmatic approach that legitimised institutions. In the English case, the Inns of Court were a key player in the debates on the reform of legal education – Dicey's inaugural lecture (1883) almost seemed to challenge the English legal profession. The schools of Jurisprudence and History at Oxford separated in 1872, but Dicey graduated in 1858 from the former Jurisprudence and Modern History School, in addition to that of Literae Humaniores.