We now have Steven Vaughan from the Faculty of Laws, UCL, on ‘The lies we tell ourselves: Problematising the (S)hallow foundations of the core of legal education’. First up is the trot through the QLD, then on data from a project Steven has been working on. Steven started by querying the reasons for the five subjects in the English QLD – chicken and egg reasoning. Students should study them because most students were already studying them. Ormrod C’ttee also had an appendix C that included Pub Int Law, Family Law, Company, Roman Law. Then Twining’s ‘creeping core’. Steven quoted Marre on why graduates should study the core they do – basically because they’re entering the profession. But as he pointed out, increasingly fewer are entering the profession.
He observes we know very little about our students. More and more solicitors are not studying law as their first degree. Marketisation of legal education provides the reason why an increasingly marketised curriculum is as it is. In the 1990s ACLEC, and moving away from a core curriculum. Debates were shaped around academic freedom and the core curriculum. The 1999 Joint Statement between SRA & BSB was important, but contrary to mythology, it said nothing about content. As Boon & Webb point out the core remained sacrosanct for other reasons.
Steven’s data focuses on a number of empirical projects: how we teach the ‘core’, what we say about a law degree, and qualitative interviews with academics. Project 1, five conclusions… Of the 86 law schools in the dataset, only 12 make a QLD optional for their students. Almost everybody teaches in blocks or modules that are the foundation. Certain groups are put together a lot. Most subjects taught in 30 credit blocks.
Re the first point, the curricular groupings look relatively similar. So few law schools, when designing the curriculum, start from first principles. Steven went back to Gower’s plan – and back further still to Roman Law Jurisprudence, Pub Int Law, ‘English Law’ which was the core at the seven English law schools in 1910. No one seems to argue that we can remove things from the core. He cited the LETR report (34) on their array.
Questions to be asked, he suggested… Does the data suggest we think that is a core of legal education best taught in chunks? Are some ideas or subjects more foundational than others, and to be taught in series? What work are core subjects doing? What do they signal? Why do we make student do a QLD when the vast majority won’t qualify? In having limited optional subjects of study are we best serving law students or best serving ourselves? To what extent are we being lazy? Or path dependent? Or both? Or something else?
Very interesting presentation of data that raises fundamental questions in analysing what law schools do, about what law schools are for (to come back to Birks’ original question).