Blackstone's Tower: The English Law School - College of Social ...

Law School Culture: A Visit to Rutland
because visitors can sniff the atmosphere, observe and ask questions,
but also because they usually have direct access to students
as well as staff.
When I was responsible for "Open Days" at Warwick, my main
task was to try to communicate to an anxious audience the nature
and significance of what we considered to be a quite distinctive
ethos. This involved a deliberately "soft sell", an attempt to deter
as well as to attract potential entrants and to advise those who
failed to get a place about other possibilities. At that time, competition
for places in law was strong, the employment prospects of law
graduates were good and public financing of students was much
more generous than it became later, including discretionary awards
for vocational training. My task was a relatively easy one, not least
because most of our students had a strong sense of the distinctiveness
of the institution, and one could rely on student guides on
Open Days to reinforce rather than contradict the message.
The situation in Rutland in the early 1990s was quite different.
First, as we have seen, there is less of a consensus among the faculty
about the objectives and ethos of the undergraduate degree.
Secondly, the students are generally more vocationally oriented
than their teachers and have more financial pressures than their
predecessors. 58 In the absence of a clear lead from the faculty, student
attitudes and expectations have a profound effect on the general
atmosphere and morale of the institution. Thirdly, it is only
recently that it has become apparent that a law degree is no longer
an almost automatic passport to a professional qualification, if one
can afford it. The combination of a recession, more stringent
requirements for training, and other factors has led to a sharp
decline in the number of training places relative to the number of
aspirant practitioners. By 1993 it was estimated that perhaps as few
as one third of law graduates could expect in future even to have
the opportunity to qualify. For a place like Rutland this could have
a dual effect: on the one hand, those who were determined to
qualify would be likely to try to enhance their chances by applying
to the more prestigious institutions, or they might try harder to get
a good degree and be strongly influenced by their conceptions of
"relevance". 59 On the other hand, those who had no firm career
intentions or who were less well-placed to compete, for academic
or social reasons, might be expected to be more sympathetic to
the idea of a law degree as providing them with a good general
education that would enable them to compete with other graduates
in the general job market.
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