Legal Education In England Research Articles

Neoliberalism, privatisation and marketisation: The implications for legal education in England and Wales

Neoliberalism, privatisation and marketisation: The implications for legal education in England and Wales

Legal education in England and Wales: what next?

This contribution takes a reflective look at the evolution and characteristics of “modern” legal education and also at some contemporary challenges. It is timely, given that 2021 is the 50th annive...

Regulatory Threats to the Law Degree: The Solicitors Qualifying Examination and the Purpose of Law Schools

Two major regulatory changes are affecting the provision of undergraduate legal education in England and Wales. On the one hand, the Qualifying Law Degree is being deregulated, meaning law schools are free to make significant changes to how and what they teach. On the other hand, higher education in England has seen a significant overhaul through the creation of the Office for Students, which treats students as consumers. Now more than ever, law schools need to ask themselves existential questions which will not only test their continued relevance or indeed viability within the ‘market’ for higher education, but also the status of the discipline of law as a whole. The regulatory landscape may indeed present a significant threat, but it is also an opportunity to reflect on what law schools are for, and consequently what changes could result from the academic freedom that comes with deregulation. Whilst different law schools will interpret their mission differently, they should caution against either generalised inertia or succumbing to an outcomes-oriented provision that simply prepares students for the new Solicitors Qualifying Examination. Instead, law schools will find their proper purpose in critical reflection and academic self-grounding, providing undergraduate students with a ‘question everything’ mentality, and showing them that law is something to be experienced and not merely learnt.

Lessons from Roman law: EU law in England and Wales after Brexit

ABSTRACTThe experience of Roman law in legal education in England and Wales may serve as a cautionary tale for EU law post-Brexit. Similarly, past debates as to the position of Roman law in the curriculum may also be instructive in the EU law context. After tracing the history of the teaching of Roman law in England and Wales, this article posits first that the factors that appear to have caused the decline of Roman law could apply equally in the context of EU law. Secondly, based on both pragmatic and liberal education arguments that have historically been proffered for the study of Roman law, it advances arguments for the retention of a compulsory stand-alone EU law module in England and Wales after Brexit. To this end, the paper contends that the arguments for the retention of EU law in legal education are more robust than those asserted traditionally in favour of Roman law.

Transforming legal education through emotions

AbstractLaw has traditionally viewed emotions as the enemies of rationality and reason, irrational and potentially dangerous forces which must be suppressed or disregarded. This separation and enmity has been mirrored within undergraduate legal education in England and Wales, with its rigid focus on seemingly impartial and objective analysis and notions such as the ubiquitous ‘thinking like a lawyer’. This paper will argue that attempts to disregard or suppress emotions within the law school are both misguided and destined to fail. It will explore the integral part emotions play within effective legal learning, the development of legal skills, and the well-being of both law students and legal academics. It will also consider how developments in legal scholarship and the evolving climate of higher education generally offer some potential, but also pitfalls, for the future acknowledgment and incorporation of emotions within undergraduate legal education in England and Wales. Bodies of literature relating to not only legal education, but also education generally, psychology and philosophy will be drawn on to demonstrate that emotions have a potentially transformative power within legal education, requiring them to be acknowledged and utilised within a more holistic, integrated form of law degree.

Legal education and proposed regulation of the legal profession in England and Wales: a transformation or a tragedy?

Legal education in England and Wales is under review as a direct result of the Solicitors Regulation Authority proposals (SRA). The SRA are implementing a number of radical changes which will have a direct effect on legal education and how educational provision will be delivered in the near future in England and Wales. The SRA have put forward a number of proposals which will introduce the solicitor apprenticeship model. This has far reaching implications for Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) who currently adopt a business model which accommodates the delivery of educational provision for those students who wish to study law and qualify as a solicitor. These changes are likely to remove or diminish the current pathways available to study and qualify as a solicitor in England and Wales. The replacement offered by the SRA is the apprenticeship model which has sent shock waves throughout higher educational institutions. The SRA believe these changes will provide a framework that is flexible and is not reliant on a sequence of exams and prescriptive stages to qualify as a solicitor, such as the academic stage (LLB), the Legal Practice Course (LPC) which is compounded by increased tuition fees and the completion of a two year training contract. The SRA’s major criticisms of the current system is how the LPC assesses specified standards during specific intervals. They believe the current standards are not universally applied and there is a lack of transparency and consistency across the higher education sector. In response to these concerns the SRA have produced a new model which they refer to as the ‘trailblazer,’ otherwise known as the apprenticeship model.

The importance of teaching dispute resolution in a twenty-first-century law school

ABSTRACTCivil justice reviews over the past 20 years have encouraged the use of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and particularly mediation. Mediation is arguably now becoming more mainstream in terms of dispute resolution process choice. In some instances law changes have been introduced requiring parties in dispute to consider using mediation; similarly, lawyers have an ethical responsibility to provide advice to their clients about the range of dispute resolution processes available. What is lacking however is a corresponding appreciation of the changing attitudes to the teaching of dispute resolution in the majority of UK law schools, where the promotion of adversarialism within the curriculum appears to remain the focus as the primary and only method of dispute resolution. The article argues that this is unreflective of current attitudes and thinking towards dispute resolution in most common law countries, where litigation is no longer necessarily the primary dispute resolution process of choice. Whilst there was token appreciation of the importance of mediation advocacy and its inclusion recommended within the Bar Practice Training Course (BPTC), the recent Legal Education and Training Review was silent on any suggestions about the inclusion of dispute resolution based curriculum content at any stage of legal education in England and Wales. The article will explore the historical development of lawyers’ attitudes to dispute resolution within the civil justice arena and academics’ teaching of curriculum associated with it in UK law schools. The article will pose questions on why recent legal history suggests that law schools should now perhaps take a more socio-legal approach to their curriculum content and embrace the teaching of dispute resolution as a defined subject area for the twenty-first-century law school.

Measuring competence in legal education: a view from the bridge

In response to the Legal Education Training Review (LETR) the professional bodies have revisited the competencies required for legal practice. The SRA has prepared a draft competency statement for day one solicitors which focuses on the “key activities required for effective performance as a solicitor”. The impact of this more comprehensive competency statement on legal education is not yet clear, but one option is that it opens up a route to qualification where competency is achieved in the workplace or other non-academic settings and assessed outside the educational establishments. This article considers how to assess competency in legal education in both educational and work based settings. It charts the development of an outcomes orthodoxy in legal education in England and Wales and in other jurisdictions and draws on research in medical education to identify key principles in the design of an assessment methodology for professional education. The article takes a broad “view from the bridge” and reviews a range of assessment methods already in use in legal education and in other professions such as accountancy, medicine and conservator restorers. It argues that a move to a complex competency orientated training system will require a different approach to both the method of assessment and its programming.

Ethics in Practice

Legal education in England and Wales is undergoing a (potentially) profound reconsideration. Last year the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the Bar Standards Board and Ilex Professional Standards launched their Legal Education Training Review (LETR). They argue that the Review is the most extensive focus on legal education and training since the publication of the Ormrod Report in 1971.1 The three frontline regulators have commissioned an independent team of law academics to conduct the research phase of the review. Notably, the team is being led by one of the founding editors of Legal Ethics, Professor Julian Webb, who is joined by a core team of three others: Dr Jane Ching and Professors Paul Maharg and Avrom Sherr.

The Role of Practice in Legal Education in England and Wales

This paper sets out the basic details of the framework within which legal education is delivered in England and Wales. It assesses the role that “legal practice” plays during the student’s law school experience.

Reviewing Legal Ethics and Legal Education in England and Wales—An Unenviable Task?

(2007). Reviewing Legal Ethics and Legal Education in England and Wales—An Unenviable Task? Legal Ethics: Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 121-123.

Fitting stories into professional legal education—the missing ingredient

THIS ARTICLE considers the absence of story‐telling from legal education in England and Wales. This important aspect of persuasion is quite thoroughly considered in the academic and professional legal literature of the USA and Australia, for example, but has received very little attention in England, specifically when one looks at professional legal education and training. Currently, the training programme for law graduates (who will qualify as barristers1) devotes considerable time to training in advocacy skills and often in case preparation as well but typically little or no time to the concept of story‐telling or story‐framing. These training programmes do not seek to inform our lawyers‐in‐waiting about the ways in which fact‐finders make decisions. If one actively seeks information and learned comment on the topic of story‐telling, the legal trainer in England is forced to turn elsewhere, usually to the USA. Undoubtedly, research is ongoing in England on the topic of juror decision‐making but at present this tends to be the exclusive province of psychologists. This article will suggest that this topic is a vital missing ingredient in professional legal training in England and that space must be made for its inclusion in such training programmes. Consideration will be given to the most appropriate ways to facilitate this inclusion. Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.2

The relationship between academic legal education and the legal profession: The review of legal education in England and Wales and the teaching hospital model

Abstract At a time when the higher education sector in the UK is undergoing changes in funding mechanisms, university law schools face a revival of a longstanding debate between the ‘academy’ and the profession over the purpose of legal education and the content of the undergraduate law degree. This debate has been renewed by the work of the training framework review group, which has been consulting on the qualification scheme for solicitors, whilst the Bar Council too has been reconsidering its qualification and training requirements. The authors examine the latest proposals against earlier recommendations for reform from, amongst others, the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct. Particular consideration is given to the integration of the academic and vocational/professional stages including their clinical legal components, as seen in the exempting degree programmes at Northumbria University. The authors argue that the integrated teaching‐hospital model is one way forward, ...

Borders and Boundaries: Locating the Law in Film

The essay examines the emergence of law and film in the curricula of law schools in the context of Britain. It outlines the development of legal education in England and Wales and the relationship between legal education and training. It notes the broadening out of the syllabus to encompass more politicized courses taught within their socio‐economic context like family law and labour law. From this shift of academic focus the politically contextual has extended to the cultural context. The relationship between law and culture both in literature and in other areas has been the end result of this relaxation of focus on professional education. Finally, the precise nature of law and film and its boundaries are discussed.

The ACLEC Report - Meeting Legal Education Needs in the 21st Century?

The Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct (ACLEC) was established in 1991 with the remit of advising on the education and training of legal service providers.1 The Committee has a statutory duty to consider the relevancy of legal education to the needs of both practitioners and the members of the public. Their work is limited to legal education in England and Wales but, I suggest, is of relevance to jurisdictions elsewhere in the common-law world, especially in view of contemporary discussions, on the international scene, on the form and content of legal education. The last significant and comprehensive review of legal education in Britain was in 1971. The Ormrod Report of that year identified three distinct levels of development: the academic; the vocational; and continuing or post qualification legal education. As has been noted elsewhere, the distinction between these stages of the educational process has dominated both the philosophy and delivery of legal education for more than 25 years. The ACLEC committee undertook, shortly after its appointment in 1991, a review of all aspects of legal education, and through consultative papers and conferences: canvassed views from a wide range of interested parties including educational providers, government law officers, the judiciary and private legal practice. Academic research studies, both existing and commissioned, together with expert consultants, were used to supplement the consultative process. This led to the publication in April 1996 of ACLEC’s First Report on Legal Education and Training. A consultative conference on the Report was held in July 1996. A further report that deals specifically with the continuing professional development of barristers and solicitors is expected in April 1997. A consultative paper on the education and training of para-legals is to be issued at the same time.

The History of New Zealand Legal Education: A Study in Ambivalence

The ambivalence which has characterised the history of legal education in England, as described in the above quote, has also been a persistent feature of legal education in New Zealand. This is not surprising in view of the heavy influence which English norms and traditions have exerted on the New Zealand profession. As in England, lawyers in New Zealand saw themselves as belonging to a cultured body of people with common skills and ideals. As part of this outlook, New Zealand lawyers came to accept, however grudgingly or hesitatingly, that they needed to know more than the mere mechanics of practice and that they needed to be exposed at least to the basics of other (academic) disciplines. At the same time, New Zealand lawyers inherited the English mindset that law, being an essentially applied discipline, was best learnt through self-help in the practice of the profession. New Zealand lawyers tenaciously clung to the English notion that immersion in practice was the only realistic way in which aspirant lawyers could learn to be effective operators of the rules and processes which regulated human conduct. This article will analyse the history of New Zealand legal education in the light of the continuing tension between the above two themes. It will do so in the context of four chronological periods which reflected important shifts in the goals and directions of New Zealand legal education.

Reaching out in legal education: Will EALP be there?

This article reviews recent changes in legal education in England and discusses some of the implications for English for Academic Legal Purposes practitioners. It begins by contrasting the traditional knowledge-of-the-sources approach to legal curriculum content with a growing additional emphasis on the skills law students will need in occupational practice. This new range of academic legal genres and associated innovations in pedagogic practices has made the legal educational context more accessible and receptive to EALP initiatives. This idea is discussed in relation to four curriculum areas: content, methods, tasks, and research strategies. Writing is one legal skill where current EAP practice in these areas seems particularly relevant.

Fundamental legal institutions

As law teachers, we are more reticent about our aims than our colleagues in other countries. It does no harm, therefore, to remind ourselves of what we are expected to do. We must start from the peculiar structure of legal education in England and Wales. The sharp division between the academic stage and the professional stage, each in the hands of institutions totally independent of each other, is almost unique to England and Wales. It does not exist in Scotland or in Northern Ireland, where there are no professional schools, and where the Universities share responsibility with the professions for most of the professional training. And it does not exist with such sharpness on the continent of Europe, or in North America. This distinction is the product of the Report of the House of Commons Committee of Legal Education in 1846. That Committee was set up when it was discovered that there was ‘no Legal Education, worthy of the name, of a public nature, in England or Ireland.

The Development of Jurisprudence in the Formative Period of Modern Legal Education in England

The Development of Jurisprudence in the Formative Period of Modern Legal Education in England