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The liberal, the vocational and legal education: a legal history review – from Blackstone to a law degree (1972)
Abstract
The recent debate concerning changes in the examination for entry to the solicitors’ profession have seen the law schools present themselves as being in a vulnerable position – victims of a controlling and regulatory legal profession. The debate has also revived concern about the dichotomy between teaching law as a liberal arts subject and teaching law as vocational training. This legal history review provides a snapshot of the discourses concerning academic legal education, what was perceived as desirable and whether this was achieved in practice. This review teaches us that academia has had greater power and control over the nature and role of legal education than it ever really wanted.
... Law as an academic discipline has been historically linked to the profession, which originally extended into a prescribed curriculum (e.g., Boon et al., 2005;Menis, 2020). The profession, through its administrative bodiesthe Bar Council and the Law Society -originally sought to exert direct control over what was taught and even at times, how it was taught and examined. ...
Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore fundamental changes and challenges in education. This is also clear within legal education in BRICS countries and beyond, where issues emerged but created space for effective ways forward. In alignment with the special issue theme, this paper provides a vision for post-pandemic education – in this case, in one discipline, namely legal education. Based on an international literature review, it is argued that to deliver appropriate skills and create well-rounded graduates effectively, there is a need to rework the vision of law as a single discipline. Thus, considering the contemporary challenges to legal education described in this paper, a different approach to the curriculum is required in which support for the development of vital skills such as creativity, critical thinking and complex problem-solving is maximised. Furthermore, attention needs to be devoted to adopting a transdisciplinary perspective delivered through inquiry-based learning. This requires thinking about problem-solving from multiple viewpoints and seeking out tools, practices and pieces of knowledge from multiple fields to arrive at better questions and solutions.
This paper is about the shaping of the law understood as a positivist enterprise. Positivist law has been the object of contentious debate. Since the 1960s, and with the surfacing of revisionist histories, it has been suggested that the abstraction of the doctrine of criminal law is due to its categorisation in early histories. However, it is argued here that positivism was hardly an intentional master plan of autocratic social control. Rather, it is important to recognise that historians do not provide a value-free recount of history. This paper examines this assertion by drawing on the writings of the English jurists William Blackstone and his work Commentaries on the Law of England (1765), and James Fitzjames Stephen’s A History of the Criminal Law of England (1883). Taking these scholars not as mere a-historical writers but reflecting on the fact that they inevitably ‘functioned’ as conduits of their own social practise opens an inquiry into the social response to a social need, which was already under way long before their time.
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