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

Epilogue
Diversification might help to mitigate some of the economic
pressures, but on its own it will not take us very far in the direction
of realising the potential of our discipline. Many of the more obvious
demands are for quite low level or minimalist services: an
introductory course for engineers or accountants, which are too
often based on a banausic and outdated view of the subject; some
quick fixes to satisfy continuing education requirements; a few
seminars for overworked judges. These are all useful and some are
interesting. But undergraduate education is the staple of our university
system and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
Public funding is largely based on the principle of "one bite of the
cherry" 15 and, by and large, English culture has tended to regard
postgraduate and advanced studies as luxuries, only relevant to a
small intellectual elite.
In order to maintain a reasonable share of the undergraduate
market and to break out of the straitjacket of the current curriculum,
law schools will have to do a much better job of persuading
the relevant constituencies that law is a good vehicle for general
education at undergraduate and other levels. Law school prospectuses
regularly proclaim that they offer a good general liberal
education in law, but one senses that few people, including many
law teachers, really believe them. There is a credibility gap
between the rhetoric of mission statements and the general perception
of undergraduate legal studies. Law school practices and discourses
reveal either a deep ambivalence about the nature of the
enterprise or an overt commitment to a narrow form of vocationalism.
For example, talk of overproduction of law graduates
assumes that numbers should be geared to training places and to
the perceived needs and absorptive capacity of the private legal
profession 16 ; about half of single honours law degrees make all of
the core subjects compulsory, although from the point of view of
general education it is difficult to see why trusts or torts or EC/EU
Law are better vehicles of liberal education than human rights or
welfare or family or environmental law or constitutional history or
fact-analysis or jurisprudence or many other potential contenders. 17
It is quite easy to make a strong case for law as a potentially
good vehicle for general or liberal education. The subject-matter is
important, extremely wide-ranging, intellectually challenging and
potentially interesting. It is also vocationally relevant to many
spheres of activity in addition to legal practice. There is a very
rich body of constantly renewed primary sources based on actual
practical problems or situations; and a solid and increasingly soph-
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