Building on a longstanding interest in the political economy of legal education (see, eg, Webb, 1999; Boon et al, 2005) I am commencing a major, archival, research project exploring aspects of the political economy of English legal education. The primary aim will be to use the data collected to publish a research monograph, provisionally entitled The English Law School, 1850-2000: A Study in the Political Economy of Higher Education.
BACKGROUND
As William Twining observed in Blackstone’s Tower (1994: 26) “Histories of legal education prior to 1945 are patchy, and the complex story of developments in the last fifty years has yet to be told in any detail”. This history matters in its own right as a study of the complex interplay between institutions and interests of government, the universities and the legal professions, and as a case study of the ‘local’, disciplinary, consequences of the successive systematisations of higher education and academic knowledge that commenced in the mid -Victorian era.
THEMES
Three broad themes will provide the foci from which to explore and explain the transformations that have taken place in the 150 years under examination.
First, the perspective of political economy suggests a useful focus on the changing dynamics of sponsorship and control over a burgeoning market for legal education. By mapping the various shifts in sponsorship and control of law schools between the profession, the universities themselves, the state, and consumers, we can trace the changing dynamic between the law schools, the profession and the state, and explain the development of certain conflicts of interest and tensions for (and within) law schools in seeking, if not to serve two or sometimes even three masters, at least to acknowledge their needs. Two key features of the analysis will focus respectively on the apparent growth and subsequent decline in professional control over the market for legal education, and the changing patterns of resourcing legal education. Part of the ‘problem’ of legal education has been the extent to which growth in the market has generated opportunities for the law schools but also problems of (perceived) quality. These changes have either supported or threatened the Law Society’s and/or the Bar’s control over its internal market for legal education, and its capacity to regulate the supply of trainees to the profession. Changing patterns of resourcing will also be considered as a feature of sponsorship, focusing on patterns of investment by the legal profession and the state in the law schools. The project will in particular explore the role played by what will be called direct and indirect ‘institutional’ funding of law schools by the professional bodies, and direct and indirect ‘philanthropic’ support from individual practitioners, law firms, and professional trust bodies.
Secondly, questions of access, choice and mobility are considered central to a political economy of higher education. Constraints on access and social mobility have long been criticised as wasteful of the ‘talents’ in society (see, eg, the Kelsall Report, 1957), reproductive of existing social and political elites, and undermining of the democratic and emancipatory functions of higher education (cp. Rhoads and Torres, 2006). Although the relative lack of diversity in recruitment to the legal profession, and with it concerns about patterns of admission, especially to the selecting universities, has risen up the political agenda in the last decade, questions about social mobility and the extent of “self-recruitment” to the professions can be traced back to the early part of the C20th. Whilst reliable statistics are few and far between for much of the first ninety years of this study, a range of qualitative sources will be used, together with extrapolations, where possible, from existing wider studies of social mobility and higher education to draw inferences about access, choice and mobility in legal education. In addition, this part of the study will also draw on original research looking at the social and educational background of the legal professional elite active between 1840 and the 1980s.
The third and final major theme of the study will be to consider what Arthurs (1998: 26) calls a ‘politics of knowledge’. This will focus on the ways in which the changing discourses of political economy become encoded in the values and priorities of the law schools. Among the issues to be explored are the longstanding, and continuing, debate as regards the ‘liberal’ or ‘professional’ nature of academic legal education, the ‘professionalisation’ of law teaching itself, and more recent debates concerning interdisciplinarity, the place of skills, and the role of legal education in developing human capital.
Aside from these main themes, the project hypothesises that the research will also demonstrate that law has occupied a ‘liminal’ place in the history of both the university and the profession. A thing that is liminal exists on a boundary or threshold and is contestable and contested. Academic legal education is liminal in a number of respects. Thus, law is one of those subjects that have reflected the problematic place of professional and other more overtly occupational disciplines in the liberal university and which in turn have made the boundaries of university education difficult to define. It also occupies an arguably liminal space in its relationship to the process of professional formation.
Links to working papers will be included on this page as the research progresses.
REFERENCES
H. Arthurs (1998), ‘The Political Economy of Canadian Legal Education’, Journal of Law & Society, 25(1), 14-32.
A. Boon, J. Flood & J. Webb (2005), Postmodern Professions? The Fragmentation of Legal Education and the Legal Profession, Journal of Law & Society, 32(3), 473-92.
R. Rhoads and C. Torres (eds)(2006), The University, State and Market: The Political Economy of Globalization in the Americas, Stanford University Press.
W. Twining (1994), Blackstone’s Tower: The English Law School, Sweet & Maxwell.
J. Webb (1999), Post-Fordism and the Reformation of Liberal Legal Education, in Fiona Cownie (ed), The Law School: Global Issues, Local Questions, Ashgate, 228-60.
