| Sana’ Al Sarghali, Lancaster University Legal Education in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: Background, Current Situation and Future Prospects |
| Dr Louise Ashley, University of Kent Exclusive Inclusivity’: Balancing status and legitimacy in the UK’s legal sector and the implications for legal education |
| Diane Atherton, Keele University ‘This was entirely my own choice...’ Professional Structures, Personal Agency and Muslim Female Solicitors |
| Professor Anthony Bradney, Keele University Are English University Law Schools Too Successful?’ |
| Rodrigo Cespedes Proto, Lancaster University Chilean Legal Education and Legal Training: Background, Current Situation and Future Prospects |
| Professor Jane Ching and Professor Rebecca Huxley-Binns, Nottingham Law School Portia, Louisa, Christabel, Yvonne, She-Hulk or Ashley? Women legal academics, their identities and their responsibilities |
| Professor Richard Collier, University of Newcastle ‘Love Law, Love Life’: Wellbeing in the Legal Profession – Some Critical Reflections on Recent Developments |
| Dr Egle Dagilyte, Peter Coe, Buckingham New University Professionalism in law degrees: chartering the territory between liberal education and legal services |
| Dr Haydn Davies and Emma Flint, Birmingham City University A Question of Ethics |
| Professor Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford Legal theory and the image: an unorthodox approach to jurisprudence |
| Dean Kim Economides, Flinders University Regulation and Reform of Legal Education in Australia: An Antipo-Dean View |
| Professor Nigel Duncan, City University The Integrative Role of Professional Ethics |
| Professor John Flood, Westminster University Legal Education is a Ponzi Scheme: It Promises a Liberal Education with Riches and Status and Guess What? It Doesn't Deliver Yet Law Schools Keep on Promising. |
| Professor Andrew Francis, Keele University Legal Education, Social Mobility and Employability: Possible Selves, Curriculum Intervention and the role of Legal Work Experience |
| Dr Oscar Guardiola-Rivera Beyond Human Rights: from southern voices to the next frontier for Law In Context Dr Matt Harvey, Victoria University, Melbourne A Distant Mirror: an Australian response to the LETR |
| Dr Jessica Guth, Bradford University Law School What’s a Law Degree Got to do with it anyway? A plea for a liberal legal education’ |
| John Hodgson, Nottingham Trent University Creating an activity based legal qualification system |
| Nina Holvast, University of Amsterdam; Visiting Research Student, University College London The role of judicial assistants in the United States, England and Wales, and the Netherlands |
| Dr Maeve Hosier, Connemara, Ireland The potential effects of the Legal Services Regulation Bill 2011 upon law teaching in Ireland |
| David Howarth, Cambridge University Law in Context and Law as Engineering: Towards a New Legal Realism |
| Emer Hunt, University College Dublin Current problems with a legal education |
| Nicola Jones, Athena Professional Continuous Learning, Transformation and Survival in the Legal Sector |
| Professor Pat Leighton, University of South Wales The LLB as a liberal degree? A re-assessment from an historical perspective |
| Professor Andrew Le Sueur, University of Essex and David Marrani, Institute of Law, Jersey Legal education and training in tiny jurisdictions |
| Professor Julian Lonbay, University of Birmingham What can be learned about legal educational standards from the European dimension? |
| Professor Michael Lower, Chinese University of Hong Kong An end to the battle for control of the law degree?’ |
| Professor Paul Maharg, Australian National University Regulatory relationships and legal education: the case of innovation |
| Professor Donald Nicholson, University of Strathclyde What has (access to) justice go to do with it? |
| Richard Owen, University of Essex Can there be a separate legal education and training agenda for Wales? |
| Professor Wes Pue, University of British Columbia Professional innovation in 3 Frontier Towns: Toronto, 1820, Birmingham, 1860, Winnipeg, 1920 |
| Professor Hilary Sommerlad, Birmingham University The professions, race and ethnicity, and the defence of social hierarchies: The challenge for legal education |
| Penelope Russell, University of Sheffield Moving the goal posts: specialisation, socialisation and minimum standards for entry into the legal profession |
| Professor Andrew Sanders, University of Birmingham The Law Degree in the light of LETR: The Centrality of Socio-Legalism |
| Dr Maureen Spencer, Middlesex University From the idealism of Robbins to the ideology of the market: Whitehall and legal education, 1963-83 |
| Caroline Strevens and Dr Clare Wilson, University of Portsmouth, and Elizabeth Lee, Australia National University Expectations of students and coping strategies in the face of 'distress': implications for legal education |
| Professor David Sugarman, Lancaster University (Re)Contextualising Dicey |
| Nima Mersadi Tabari, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies The Law School of the Future: The International Mooting Module at King’s College London |
| Dr Dawn Watkins, University of Leicester Legal Education – a suggestion on how not to lose your Ass |
| Susan Watson, Kingston University and Susan Scott Hunt, Middlesex University, (The Kingston Law School Project) Emphasis on the market: early resolution of student disputes now imperative? |
| Professor Lisa Webley, University of Westminster Access to a Career in the Legal Profession in England and Wales: Race, Class, and the Role of Educational Background |
| Professor Helen Xanthaki and Ronan Cormacain, IALS The SWD Legislative Drafting Clinic: first steps, big promise |
W. G. Hart Legal Workshop: 2014
Legal Education and the Professions: Deliver the LETR?
The W G Hart Legal Workshop 2014 was held at the Institute from Monday 23 June 2014 to Tuesday 24 June 2014. The 2014 Workshop entitled: Legal Education and the Professions: Deliver the LETR? provided some academic distance from LETR and professions' and regulators' responses. It represented an important opportunity to think about some of the issues identified below, and many other aspects of legal education and training and the professions.
Academic Directors:
- Professor Avrom Sherr (IALS, University of London)
- Professor Hilary Sommerlad (Birmingham University)
- Professor Richard Moorhead (University College London)
Currently legal education is going through a period of unprecedented change and the Workshop provided an important opportunity for reflection on these changes and specifically on the report and recommendations published last year by the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR). The workshop addressed not only the changes proposed by the LETR but also the broader issues of what is, and what should be, the role of legal education; whether legal education should continue to seek to provide a liberal, humanist education (and whether it will even be able to do so), or whether the emphasis on the market inevitably means that legal education will become tailored to the demands of the profession. The Workshop brought together some 80 academics to discuss these and other issues, both practical and pedagogical, including contributions from America, Australia Canada, Hong Kong and Israel, and from the regulators for England and Wales. The Academic Directors of the Workshop were Professor Avrom Sherr (IALS), Professor Richard Moorhead (UCL), and Professor Hilary Sommerlad (Birmingham). The keynote addresses were given by Professor Richard Abel from UCLA Law School and Professor Harry Arthurs, Osgoode Hall Law School, Canada.
The first day of the Workshop ended with a reception to honour Professor Avrom Sherr and the official unveiling of Professor Sherr's portrait by the notable portrait painter Alastair Adams, member and President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, which now hangs alongside Alastair's earlier works of Professors Daintith and Rider. Over 120 friends and colleagues were present, with the occasion marked by various speeches and we were particularly delighted to welcome back Lord Hope, former chair of IALS Advisory Council during Professor Sherr's Directorship, for the official unveiling of the new portrait, which all agreed was a truly outstanding addition to the Institute's collection.
The Legal Education Review (LETR) has produced its research report, but its recommendations generate many questions. For instance, it has suggested an approach which could transcend the boundaries between the different legal professions. As a result, the LSB is pushing regulators towards evidence- and risk-based policy and the SRA are indicating a bonfire of the regulations - but do we know enough about the interactions between regulation and education to justify this move?
Another of the report's key proposals is that legal education be shaped by outcomes unlike those currently governing education and training. However, if drawn at too high a conceptual level, such competencies might be too vague to be useful, yet if they are more tightly specified they are likely to provide a never ending list of standards to be attained. The result could be that legal educators and professionals 'drown in a sea of competencies', while the means by which such competencies will be assessed, and by whom, is uncertain. Will assessment be by the market, 'traditional' University law schools, vocational law schools, even venture capitalists? And how will such a market driven system impact on academic research?
All these questions point to an even more fundamental, and long standing, issue – namely, what is, and what should be, the role of a legal education? Should it – will it be able to - continue to seek to provide a liberal, humanist education designed primarily to inculcate a critical awareness of the meaning of law, including its ethical content and social role? Or does the emphasis on the market inevitably mean that it will be explicitly tailored to the demands of the profession? This is the logic of LETR's recommendations, but it had great difficulty in divining the future of legal practice. Some indications may be found in a recent paper by The Law Society of England and Wales and the results of the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law's "Innovating Justice" Project. Clearly, legal educators will need to understand the possible futures both for the professions and the Rule of Law. However it is undeniable that this task is made more difficult by the dramatic changes the professions have undergone in recent years, which have served both to produce further fragmentation and make the future highly opaque.
These 'big' questions generate practical, pedagogical issues. For instance, if legal service provision is to be dominated by new models of provision, modes of delivery and concerns with professional engagement, how will this impact on what is taught and how it is taught? Should systems thinking, design and big data be integrated into a legal curriculum? And how should Law Schools respond to, on the one hand, the increased emphasis in universities on employability and, on the other, the growth in low wage, casual labour markets within the professions, markets which also appear to be predominantly populated by graduates from Black and Minority Ethnic and lower socio-economic backgrounds? Does this reduce the legitimacy of legal education? Do Law Schools have an ethical obligation to warn applicants of the likely difficulties in entering the professions? In the United States this is now a high profile issue: Law Schools have been accused of promoting their ability to provide law jobs to graduates unfairly, and have seen a significant drop in applications, leading to a review of their whole approach. President Obama has suggested that a law degree should take two, rather than three postgraduate years. The Bologna Declaration for education in the EU suggests that educational systems throughout Europe should aim for three years of education plus two years of practical training. In England and Wales solicitors are already one year above this prescription.