Of wars, skirmishes and peaceful interludes: the legal academy and the legal profession

In her paper Fiona Cownie (Keele University) examined the historical relationship between the legal profession and the legal academy, attempting to place developments in legal education within the context of higher education as a whole and making some tentative suggestions about how the legal academy might handle its relationship with the practising legal profession in the future.

Fiona’s slides are embedded below.

Since the introduction of the discipline of law to universities in England and Wales at the end of the 19th century the relationship between the legal academy and the legal professions has been uneasy, and at times openly hostile. How can we put this relationship in perspective as we think about ‘academic futures’?

Over the years the relationship between the legal academy and the legal professions has received much attention from scholars, but the full historical context of this relationship has not been extensively examined. Fiona’s paper examined the historical relationship between the legal profession and the legal academy, using a range of sources including material from the archive of the Society of Legal Scholars.

About Fiona

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Fiona Cownie is a professor of law at Keele University. She is Past President of the Society of Legal Scholars and a former Vice Chair of the Socio-Legal Studies Association.
 
She has a longstanding interest in legal education and sits on the Strategy Committee of UKCLE’s Advisory Board. Her research interests focus on legal education, and include the professional identities of legal academics and the culture of law schools, the policy of legal education and aspects of legal pedagogy. In 2009 she published (with Professor Ray Cocks) a monograph entitled ‘A great and noble occupation!’: the history of the Society of Legal Scholars and she has just completed an edited collection, Stakeholders in the law school.
 
Fiona has a longstanding interest in teaching academic legal skills, and is a co-author of How to study law, the 5th edition of which will be published later in 2010.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010