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

What are Law Schools for?
(i) to move in the direction of being mainly service institutions for
the profession, curtailing undergraduate numbers, but becoming
more involved in vocational training at all stages, including
advanced and specialised training;
(ii) to continue to be mainly primary schools, largely confined to
introductory legal education, but to diversify their clientele by more
wholeheartedly offering "law for non-lawyers", especially by
making undergraduate legal education more attractive as a form of
general or liberal education and competing for students with the
social sciences and humanities; or
(iii) to move more boldly in the direction of the ILC model by diversifying
upwards as well as outwards, placing greater emphasis on
advanced studies both for lawyers and non-lawyers and taking all
law, not just lawyers' law, for their province.
It should be fairly obvious that my sympathies lie with the more
ambitious I.L.C. model and that I personally favour diversification
of function and much greater emphasis on advanced and interdisciplinary
studies. But my purpose here is to interpret the situation
rather than to make a plea for a particular strategy. It is difficult
to predict how the situation will develop during the next few
years, except that it seems unlikely that the outcome will conform
neatly to any single one of these models.
Some things are reasonably clear, however: First, although the
models are not mutually exclusive, there are profound differences
between a professional school, an undergraduate liberal arts
department, and a multi-functional institution concerned with the
study of all aspects of law at a variety of levels. These differences
relate to objectives, scale, and finance and, above all, to what I
shall refer to as academic culture. 27 Secondly, although government
policy, the economy, and choices by individual institutions
will play their part, the future shape of legal education is likely to
continue to be largely demand-led, that is to say that to a very large
extent developments will depend on the perceptions of parents,
students and employers about the relevance of different kinds of
legal studies to their needs and aspirations. Thirdly, even if the
institutionalised discipline of law expands outwards and upwards
to encompass a more diverse clientele and a greater emphasis on
advanced studies, primary legal education is likely for the foreseeable
future to be at the core of the funding of university law schools
as institutions. If a law degree is perceived as being mainly the
first stage towards qualifying as a barrister or solicitor and if the
opportunities to qualify and to earn a good living in legal practice
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