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

What are Law Schools for?
side work". The danger of this kind of self-image is that an institution
may get the worst of both worlds, if it treats undergraduate
teaching as its main function and the undergraduate degree is perceived
and used mainly as the first stage of professional formation.
For what is such an institution except a primary or even nursery
school for the profession? 22
It is not clear how many of these types were really feasible
options at the time of the Ormrod exercise. What is clear is that the
post-Ormrod settlement gave university law schools a specifically
"academic" role. In particular, various possible structures were
ruled out: a university-based integrated system of education and
clinical training on an analogy with Medicine; making the law
degree a post-graduate qualification, as in the United States; the
Continental model of a much longer academic stage followed by
varying (often specialised) provisions for further training; nongraduate
entry through apprenticeship and examinations. Even the
standard option of making a law degree a necessary qualification
for entry to the profession was not accepted: instead the Ormrod
Committee recommended that nongraduate entry should be wholly
exceptional, that the law degree should be the normal route of
entry, but that provision should be made for graduates in other
subjects to be able to take a two-year conversion course to qualify
for exemptions. 23 The outcome was that we are almost the only
country in the Western world that does not require a law degree
for intending practitioners of law. Nor does our system give university
law schools a monopoly over the academic stage of professional
formation. Until recently the structure virtually excluded
them from the three later stages of professional training—vocational,
apprenticeship, and continuing. That structure has become
established and would now be rather difficult to change.
During the period of expansion and diversification of the past
thirty years many of the ambiguities about the objectives and priorities
of law schools could be glossed over or left unresolved.
Demand for legal studies was high at a number of levels and on
the whole the higher education system and the legal profession
responded to much of the demand.
There was a sharp change in the situation in the early 1990s
brought about by a series of factors, mainly economic, of which
the recession and government policies affecting legal services, legal
aid, the professions, student funding and higher education were the
most prominent. As the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee on
Legal Education and Conduct (ACLEC) began the first major review
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