This was a braw, brave conference. James Griffin and Exeter were our hosts, and they did us proud with an ambitious hybrid format that was a first for a BILETA conference and that’s damn difficult to organise. Kudos to all who organised and assisted. The Oxford Abstracts conference software was so useful, again, as it was last year for the online conference; and ably organised by the incredibly-efficient digital assistant, Kirsty Melvin. Some conferences have their share of shallow or badly thought-through papers. BILETA, like any serious academic body, referees presentation proposals, and those authors who wish to publish their papers in the usual places (IRLCT, EJLT) go through double blind peer review processes. It was clear that those standards were having their filtering effects. On the topic of legal education presentations, I was sorry to see that there were papers sufficient for only one parallel session. This reflects a longer and multi-factorial decline in interest in research on the subject, of course, and has nothing to do with this conference in particular. It may be that BILETA needs to take action to reverse this trend.
But that’s no longer my concern. I had decided for quite a few reasons, health largely, personal choice too, the usual, that I’m retiring, and that this would be my final BILETA conference, and made that public at the end of my keynote.
I’ve been a part of the BILETA community since the mid-nineties, by my count given 17 papers, been Chair, organised two conferences, edited special BILETA journal issues. I’m so grateful for the BILETA research funds that came my way, the super people I’ve met and shared interests with, and those such as Abdul Paliwala and Philip Leith (how I miss his dry Scots wit) who were my mentors. It became my circle. But I’m 65 now – time to let younger and more dynamic members of the community step forward, shape research agendas and organise the future in legal education in particular and in BILETA more generally. I’d urge anyone interested in law and technology to become involved in it. It’s a wonderful professional body. Over the past few years I’ve seen it grow more international, from its base in our disUK and Ireland, and then Europe (in 2020 we were Toronto-bound, but Covid put paid to that). What I treasure is the sense of community around shared interests, and especially around the digital knowledges and cultures that have developed since the founding of BILETA in the mid-1980s – which seems like the 1880s, now.
Looking back over the last 33 years or so of digital developments my first emotion is gratitude that I’ve lived to see the first stages of the digital revolution in human society. The time has been, to adapt the metaphor of the infant stage of print production, the incunable period of digital; and it’s been unbelievably exhilarating, depressing, inspiring. traumatising, a rollercoaster of innovation, failure, success, vast changes wrought to so many lives, and for the first time in human history. There’s so much to say about that in detail – I’ve been writing about it all my career in my tiny corner of the forest and yet I seem to have barely touched the surface. What I would want to note, as I’ve said in a number of articles and keynotes, is that in legal education we haven’t paid enough attention to curating our technological history: it’s disappearing before our eyes, the material cultures, the motivations, the politics, the experiences, the reflections, and leaving few traces of its passing. Bodies such as BILETA can help to conserve and serve as places for reflection and sites of remembrance and analysis. Long may it continue that essential tradition.
That disappearance seems to me now to be part of a personal failure. I so dislike the inauthenticity of valedictory congratulation and victory narratives that accompany retirements and career-endings. The decision to retire itself seems like an admission of failure, a letting go when there’s so much to do. Leafing through the research folders on my computer, there were projects unfunded, fits and starts, lines of publications that rose and petered out in dead-ends, publications that seemed crucial at the time, but are much less so in retrospect. Sure, there were perennial concerns and themes. But I also recognised the hubris of reaching for quick formulations of problems, the unscholarly vanity of seizing a solution that’s no longterm solution. The sheer random nature of impact. The absurdity of REF. I wrote an article with Martin Owen back in 2007 entitled ‘Simulations, learning and the metaverse: changing cultures in legal education,’ that had attracted a modest readership over 15 years or so. Recently that increased exponentially and can be timed with precision to the announcement on 28 October 2021 by Zuckerberg on, god help us, his vision for the metaverse.[1]Reviewing my work, I’m torn between trying to articulate some kind of core vision about legal education, while agreeing with Yochai Benkler’s ironic reading of The Matrix that ‘there is no spoon’. For instance curriculum is not as we imagine it a collection of classes or teaching or learning practices but a set of technologies based upon understandings and relationships. On a reading of its history (not necessarily reductionist, either) it is constructed of multiple distributed technologies and practices. Examples are timetables, course teams, notepads, learning spaces, forms of knowledge transmission, discussion, seminar discourse, lab tools, computers, forms of speech, writing – complicated technologies that crowd our curricula and are the basis of much of what we do in Higher Education. And those complicated technologies (taking Sydney Dekker’s distinction between complicated tech and complex tech) become complex when run in real time with real humans in real educational situations.
So retirement is going to be a process, never an event. BILETA has been most generous. I’m now an Hon Vice President, and the Exec has funded a legal education prize in my name which I was really touched, and felt undeservedly honoured by. No doubt I’ll be drafted into project work of one sort or another but I want to set down my heartfelt and public thanks for their kindnesses. I finish up with Osgoode in a couple of weeks’ time after five great years there; but I’ll be working part-time on Osgoode projects for a while yet, and of course I will be working a day a week with Newcastle Law School for the next few years. And if any interesting projects come my way I’ll no doubt find it hard to say no… As regard this blog, I’ll be attempting to write more and better posts than recently, maybe start by saying something about the keynote, later.
To sign off I’d like to quote three extracts that seem to me to sum up what BILETA has meant to me over the years, in a variety of ways, inevitably drawn from my corner of the academic forest, and to do with past and future, change, identity, educational tech and research:
‘Imagine that you enter a parlour. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion has already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late. You must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.’
Kenneth Burke, ‘The Philosophy of Literary Form’, quoted as epigraph to Graham Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict (Harvester Wheatsheaf 1994)
‘[…] there are no essential readings of identity, merely misreadings; and we need to ask deeper questions about legal identity, how the canon of identity is formed and unformed, and how we come to misread it. The key question was formed by Harold Bloom: ‘do we choose a tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place or a being chosen?’ (Bloom, 1980, 33).
Maharg, P. (2011). The identity of Scots law: redeeming the past. Scottish Life and Society. A Compendium of Scottish Ethnology: Law Edinburgh, Birlinn Press.
‘It is impossible to overstate the enormity of changes in literacy and literacy practices wrought by developments in electronic technologies. Because we can’t comprehend what is happening, we search for apt metaphors, or for historical examples which might serve to explain what is happening. So let me ask: “Are we in the middle of a second Gutenberg revolution?” The answer in brief is “No, we’re not”; what is taking place in the field of literacy is more far-reaching, and more fundamental.’
Gunther Kress, from the Preface to A-Z 21st Century Literacy Handbook: Linking Literacy and Software. A Handbook for Education and Training, ed Christina Preston
- [1]The irony is that I’ve never used Fb, and despise its values and corporate culture.↩