Legal Education Debate
Centre for Legal Education Launch - Legal Education Debate
On 3 May 2012, Nottingham Law School hosted Visions of Legal Education and formally launched the Centre for Legal Education (CLE). Visions was arranged to try and obtain a broad view of what that future might hold for legal education, and what law students felt that future should encompass.
The debate attracted legal practitioners from across the country and Baroness Ruth Deech, chair of the Bar Standards Board, opened the event with a speech launching the Centre for Legal Education. The centre has a broad mission. It coordinates researchers at Nottingham Law School involved in legal education and the enhancement of legal practice and its aims are:
- To work alongside, and in a manner useful to, those who are involved in providing legal education that serves any of the legal services sectors in the UK or overseas.
- To enhance standards of legal education, and of legal service practitioners who undertake such education, and thereby improve public confidence in the legal service sector of society and enhance the rule of law.
Visions was a Question Time panel, chaired by Baroness Deech. The panelists included:
- David Urpeth, Partner at Irwin Mitchell
- Gary Lee Walters of Stretlaw
- Becky Huxley-Binns, Reader in Legal Education at Nottingham Law School and Co-Director of the CLE
- Nazmin Akthar, barrister and legal blogger
- Baishali Majumdar, trainee solicitor and alumna of Nottingham Law School and Paul Hutchinson of CILEx Lawyers.
Each panellist had uploaded their own vision of legal education to the Centre's website in advance of the event and after brief introductions, they took questions and comments from the floor. A lively and interesting debate ensued which also generated a huge amount of discussion on twitter with the hashtag #NLSLED. You can still view an interactive archive of all the tweets.
The final question of the morning, by Graham Ferris, Reader in Law at Nottingham Law School and member of the CLE, asked the panellists to rank what he summarised as the five identified purposes of legal education and training from the debate:
- equality and fairness of access to justice
- to educate students to think about the law; to gain a legal education in the broadest sense
- to prepare the students for jobs, whether the traditional legal jobs, non-traditional legal jobs, or non-legal jobs
- to prepare students to meet the needs of employers of legal service providers
- to allow and encourage students to internalise the principles of professional legal services provision thus serving both legal service providers and the more general public interest.
We would be interested to know how important you believe these objectives are. Would you include anything else? Please tweet us your thoughts using #NLSLED or leave a comment on our facebook page.
If you missed the event, you may also want to read the some of the blog posts from the day:
- Legal Education Debate: A summary of today's vision for tomorrow's students by Gary Lee Walters, #NLSLED panelist and founder of Stretlaw
- NTU Centre for Legal Education Conference by Paul Maharg, Professor of Legal Education at Northumbria Law School
- Red-LETR week? by Julian Webb, Professor of Legal Education at the University of Warwick and Senior Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London
- Nottingham Law School's day of legal education: innovation at the heart of education by Legal Aware, the BPP's Legal Awareness Society
- Education, Training, Reviewed? #NLSLED by Pete Smith from Sheffield Hallam's LawSync.
Nottingham Law School was very grateful for the kind sponsorship of LexisNexis, the lead sponsor, as well as Routledge Publishing, Oxford University Press and Hodder Education.
