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

Law in the Universities: The Historical Context
tutions have been involved in continuing legal education, judicial
training and other specialised offerings, although these are not yet
highly developed.
Similarly, there has been a great increase in non-degree level
legal education, including A level law, access courses, paraprofessional
training and other programmes. 68 I shall suggest later that
law schools, especially in the "old" universities, have been rather
slow to move away from the perception of themselves as being
primarily undergraduate institutions, although they have greatly
diversified their clientele in the past 20 years. One implication of
this is that the market for legal education is much more varied than
it was traditionally perceived to be and law schools may have a
more secure economic base than they imagine,
(iii) Finance. Debates and reports on legal education have regularly
underestimated the importance of economics. In most countries
law has traditionally been perceived as one of the cheapest disciplines.
It is thought to have modest requirements in respect of staffstudent
ratios, accommodation and equipment, except books. This
image is so deeply entrenched that it is almost impossible to
change. In England, legal education and training have made
modest demands on public funding for two further reasons: in some
countries, such as the United States, law teachers are paid higher
salaries than colleagues in most other disciplines in order to at least
mitigate the fact that legal practice can be highly lucrative and that
law teaching involves financial sacrifice for most of those who
make it a career. 69 In England until now law teachers have generally
been on the same salary scales as colleagues in the humanities
and social sciences, but this may change in the context of an emergent
free or freer market for academic salaries. Furthermore, during
the Ormrod exercise the representatives of the Bar and Law Society
were responsible for what many consider to be a self-inflicted
wound. By insisting that the vocational stage should take place
within independent professional schools that they controlled, they
gave successive governments the opportunity to refuse to provide
direct public funding for post first-degree professional training. 70
Since 1971 law has been the poor relation of medicine and engineering.
This has greatly inhibited the development of the vocational
stage and has led to one great injustice: as money has become
tighter local authorities have increasingly refused to give discretionary
grants for the vocational stage, thereby denying many less welloff
students access to the legal profession. 71 This remains a blot on
our system.
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