'The success of university law schools in England and Wales: or how to fail' by Anthony Bradney in (2018) 52(4)
The Law Teacher 490-498 comments
University law schools in England and Wales presently have a very successful model for providing undergraduate education. This model allows them to discharge their duties with respect to both teaching and research. Providing they are careful in their claims they can make sure that they are compliant with the standards sets by the Advertising Standards Authority. Any change to this model, involving them in trying to train solicitors in their undergraduate degrees, would see law schools fail in the same manner that law schools have failed in the USA and lead to potential cases before the Advertising Standards Authority.
Bradney argues
Legal academics in England and Wales are often neither optimistic nor buoyant individuals. Some of the reasons for this are to do with the present situation in higher education. Thus, for example, precarious employment is as much a feature of contemporary law schools as it is of their parent universities. A number of commentators have noted the degree to which systemic introduction of casual employment contracts for academics has taken place in United Kingdom universities. With the move away from permanent employment comes “stress, [and] anxiety”. Another more longstanding change in universities and their law schools has been the introduction of an audit culture which measures performance with respect to an ever-increasing range of indicators. The introduction of a research audit in 1985 has been followed by a series of other forms of new audit processes at national, institutional and individual levels. The newest form of audit is the recent introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework whose first results were announced in 2017. Each of these processes is significant in its own right but the cumulative result also needs to be considered. Burrows, for example, has argued that the metrics which are part of audit, taken together, produce “quantified control” of academic life. It is not that audit in universities is either wrong in itself or even new. Self-examination for both institutions and individuals is a desirable process. The axiom “know thyself” has an ancient lineage. Equally law schools and legal academics have not suffered from all of the adverse consequences of audit that are to be found in some other academic disciplines. s
Nonetheless both the specific failings of particular examples of audit together with the general conceptual misunderstandings that lie behind the current mania for such audit in the public sector have had deleterious effects on the lives of some legal academics. In this context it is perhaps not surprising that a number of contemporary legal academics report high levels of stress and anxiety. However, an examination of the history of university legal education in England and Wales suggests that part of the reason for trepidation in legal academics may be deeper rooted than the problems of the present day.
In his obituary of Holland in 1975 Goodhart observed that
"… he [Holland] suffered from the same weakness to which a number of scholars at Oxford and Cambridge have succumbed – the fear of appearing in print in case they would subject themselves to criticism for some error of which they ought to have been aware."
This “weakness” is not limited to Oxbridge legal scholars of the 1970s. Gardner has commented that “I’m sure all academics think that they are charlatans some days”. Whilst his remark is an exaggeration it does point to an important truth about the nature of the academic psyche. A person who does not simply reject out of hand Hume’s argument that the proposition that the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible than that it will or who can comprehend the existential angst of Roquentin in Sartre’s Nausea will always query apparent verities. The scepticism that lies at the root of the academic disposition makes doubt a prerequisite to every judgement. Everything we as academics do, say and write is continually in question. Academic freedom creates an obligation that makes us individually wholly responsible for all of our actions. What is vaunted today may be damned tomorrow. The agreement of our peers may show no more than that they share our errors. And, moreover, what is at risk, the accuracy of our judgements, is central to who we are as academics. In almost every instance this pressure is all to the good, pushing us to do ever better work. However, as the example of Holland above shows, there are occasions when the converse is the case. In relation to some questions excessive caution can lead to inaccurate judgements. In this article I will argue that this can be the case in the present day when the academic discipline of law assesses the overall quality of its work and then plans its future.
