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

What are Law Schools for?
of legal education and training in England and Wales since
Ormrod, 24 it was becoming increasingly apparent that the legal profession
would only be able to absorb a relatively small proportion
of those aspiring to practice, or at least to qualify, perhaps as few
as a third. At the same time law was being given an increasingly
high profile in the media, in popular culture and on the international
scene. While there was increasing talk of "overproduction"
of law graduates, talk which assumed that the main function of
undergraduate law degrees was to prepare people for the profession,
there was also talk of the need for more continuing education,
specialist training, judicial studies, paraprofessional training,
human rights education and legal literacy. The market for legal
educational services was expanding in some directions while contracting
in others. University law schools had only been one kind
of institution among several that provided legal education and it
was only in the late nineteen-eighties that they had begun to move
away from their self-image as being essentially providers of undergraduate
and other forms of primary legal education. Questions
therefore arose about the future shape and scale of the national
system of legal education provision and the role of university law
schools within it.
In 1994 it seemed that the range of strategic possibilities was
quite limited. 25 It was going to be difficult to break out of the
Ormrod structure. On the one hand, the clinical medical school
model, the postgraduate professional school, the five-year undergraduate
programme and other expensive options could be ruled
out as not being feasible within a system which was still largely
dependent on public finance, at least at the primary stage. On the
other hand, it seemed equally unlikely that English universities
would move directly to a mass system involving open entry and
very large first year classes. Although there was a strong trend
towards eroding the legal profession's monopolies on some legal
services, the tendency was to make entry to the legal profession
more competitive and professional training more rigorous. It was
extremely unlikely that there were would be a return to nongraduate
entry on a large scale, but it was also improbable that a
law degree as such would be required for entry to the profession. 26
It also seemed unlikely that law schools would be content with
being little more than nursery schools for the profession, contracting
in size and accepting such a limited role.
This left three main possibilities for English university law
schools:
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