Our first featured blog is by Professor Emerita Fiona Cownie of Keele University, a recognised authority on legal education and scholarship. Fiona writes about some of the difficulties in navigating the legal education space.
While there are many good things about being a specialist in legal education, it can also be challenging. Some people will look down on you simply because you are interested in legal education (!!) If you are going to challenge that attitude, it is not enough to be a good teacher, interested in and trying out different teaching techniques. To be a legal education specialist, able to counter ignorance with expertise, you need to have a good knowledge of the field, know what you think the purpose of a university legal education is, and be familiar with the relevant literature. Ideally, you need to be writing and publishing about legal education; indeed, in some institutions, there is an expectation that you will do that, and it is reflected in the promotion criteria – see for example Glasgow University’s promotion criteria.pdf
The expectation may be, as at Glasgow, that publications will contribute to SoTL (the scholarship of learning and teaching) although some institutions may define educational outputs more broadly and not differentiate between research about legal education and any other legal research. But regardless of your precise career aspirations, developing your expertise is the best way to become a ‘legal education person’, able to rebuff with confidence some very annoying assumptions!
One assumption that legal education people frequently come across is the belief (confidently asserted but based on no evidence whatsoever) that anyone who delivers a lecture or tutorial automatically becomes an expert in legal education. In their view, ‘We’re all experts in legal education, so anyone who teaches in a university can deliver excellent teaching, and think and write with originality about learning and teaching.’ Completely wrong! You gain expertise in legal education in the same way as you do any legal subject – by studying the literature and thinking about it, constructing your own ideas, building up your understanding. People who think all legal academics who deliver teaching are legal education experts are simply wrong! Just because you teach students it doesn’t mean you understand how they learn or how to deliver the most effective teaching. Merely walking into a lecture theatre doesn’t, by itself, give you a philosophy of education or a real understanding of the purpose of a university education. And delivering a tutorial doesn’t automatically mean you are familiar with the vast secondary literature or the current debates. Have a look at Tony Bradney’s book, Conversations, Choices and Chances: the liberal law school in the twenty-first century for an exploration of the debates about legal education and an indication of the range of secondary literature it is necessary to draw upon to produce a scholarly analysis of legal education.
Another annoying assumption that you come across is that if you’re an academic in a law school, you should only be focusing on substantive legal subjects. English Legal System is pretty suspect from that perspective, and legal education is beyond the pale. Rubbish!! A law school is part of a university. The main purpose of a university is to expand the boundaries of human knowledge. Seriously thinking about legal education, gaining expertise in the subject and writing original, rigorously-evidenced work which contributes to the expansion of human knowledge are all activities which have a place in a university. Stefan Collini’s work on universities, in particular his book What Are Universities For? (Penguin UK, 2012) is an interesting read in this context. I am not going to get into the question of whether the ‘powers that be’ categorise writing and publishing about legal education as scholarship or research; suffice it to say that if it’s original, rigorously argued and evidenced published work, it has a place in a university, as much as research into substantive legal subjects.
Negative attitudes towards legal education specialists are not new. As long ago as 1950, L.C.B. Gower (known to all his friends and colleagues as ‘Jim’) published in the Modern Law Review an extended version of his inaugural lecture as the Sir Ernest Cassel Professor of Law at the L.S.E. (Gower, 13.2 MLR (1950) 137). Gower was a distinguished company lawyer, but he chose to devote his inaugural lecture to a critique of legal education; a subject which, he commented, ‘has aroused singularly little interest in recent years, and the general professional attitude to it is one of complacent apathy’. His contemporaries, he was appalled to discover, seemed completely unaware that there were any intellectual debates going on about legal education.
By 1974, legal academics were still generally ill-informed about legal education. In that year, Professor William Twining was asked to give a talk on ‘legal teaching technique’ to the Young Members’ Group of the SPTL (now the SLS). He produced a questionnaire for the occasion (discussed in full in Cownie & Cocks (2009) ‘A Great and Noble Occupation: the History of the Society of Legal Scholars p,128).
Part A of the questionnaire asked whether the participants had ever read any of a list of books about higher education. Today, we might ask:
Have you ever read:
Twining went on to ask whether anyone had read various books on legal education. Today we might ask:
I want to finish by asking, as Professor Twining did all those years ago:
Despite its challenges, being a legal education person can be rewarding, intellectually stimulating ... and enjoyable. And uncovering new knowledge about legal education definitely deserves its place in a university.
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