LETR conference: paper session 1

First up, Steven Vaughan, by video conference, on ‘Same-same but different?  The current and future LLB offerings on law schools in England and Wales’.  He started with conversations with colleagues he had about grades and the relative difficulty of subjects, the Joint Statement (JS) and the normative hold it had on the curriculum.  Law degrees look similar, but there’s no requirement for that similarity.  Is it a form of path-dependency that causes this, or some other cause?  There’s variation of knowledge among his colleagues on what constitutes a QLD.  The Joint Statement is silent on many issues, eg forms of assessment.  He thought that SQE is an opportunity for law schools, but now is not so sure, given the light touch regulatory environment that exists at present.  In a project he focused on law schools in E+W (minus York because of its PBL blending).  Five interesting points arose from the comparisons.

1. Only 9 law schools make a QLD optional for students.
2. Almost everyone teaches in blocks (note it’s not required in JS)
3. Certain groups of subjects are taught at the same time across institutions, eg Contract, Criminal and Public in year 1.  Because these are foundational?  Because they’re easier?  or more interesting?
4. Academics teach in more or less the same size of block, eg 30 credits for Public; 2 of the 3 years are taken up with Foundational subjects – so space for beyond-foundation?
5. Very little else is made compulsory over the Foundation subjects, apart from units such as legal research, legal system, etc.  Striking how little else is made foundational…

There’s a level of similarity that can’t be explained away by existing regulation. In his project Steven is furthering exploring why this might be so.  I’m looking forward to reading his results.

Next, Ben Waters on ‘How can we SQEeze it all in? Some challenges facing law schools in England and Wales’.  Clearly referencing the SRA’s SQE, which is of course a key theme of the conference.  He thinks there are real opportunities – what to teach, how to structure it.  He began with current law school diversity – liberal education, black letter, sociolegalism, practical/experiential (not sure I agree with the categories, or at least the strict differentiation of the approaches, they always seem to me to be more intertwined and imbricated).  The SRA’s Training for Tomorrow report (T4T) wanted to ensure ‘day one competence’ for solicitors.  Competence statement = solicitor competence, threshold standards, and legal knowledge.  Regulation will be light touch for law schools.  Ben summarised the ‘functional knowledge’ of SQE1 (see SRA SQE website for details). Questions he asked:

1. Positioning / marketing – who wants to be a solicitor among our students?
2. Do we want to prepare our students for the SQE?
3. A stage 1-ready law degree followed by a fourth yar leading to SQE2?
4. Buttressed by a US Bar type (cramming ) examination?
5. clinic – to provide client-readiness?

Ben noted that the challenges up ahead include staffing, and maintenance of the liberal legal education.

Next, Luke Mason, ‘From multi-modal to anti-modal reasoning in five short years: Unpicking the thick and thin theories of law in LETR and SQE’.  Luke focused on three document sets – QAA, LETR and SQE documents.  LETR, he said, was remarkably diverse and broad about legal education.  His paper looked at how legal reasoning is inherently multi-modal, how LETR embraced that diversity, and SQE does not.  Overview here:

Luke summarised modal theory and its application to legal education, and in a complex and exciting paper showed how law school legal education can be multi-model.  At one point he took the theme of legal assessment:

And he characterises the SQE as stupid legal realism (while not saying that legal realism is at fault…).  His analysis is acute:

And its practical implications:

Excellent paper.  The only point I’d add (churlishly) to his argument would be a consideration of the  phenomenological contexts of knowledge creation, authority, student agency etc within legal education as currently constituted – how law school staff construct students through discourse.  Something that, eg Elizabeth Mertz does superbly in her lethal linguistic anthropological analysis of the US law school case method in The Language of Law School.

Jessica Guth (and Kathryn Dutton) next, on ‘SQEezed out: SRA, status and stasis’.  Jessica focused on diversity, costs, recruitment practices – there is no progress on this in the last five years, she holds, and the SQE will make things worse.  The SQE eg won’t make any progress on the recruitment practices of Magic Circle firms.  She’s surely right on that; and the widening access / widening participation issue argument that the SRA makes for SQE must be seen in this light.