Keynote address at 2009 Conference

The keynote speaker at Learning in Law Annual Conference 2009 was Ian Ward (Newcastle University). Ian addressed two questions: what is a law school for? and what should a law school be teaching?. Ian’s slides are embedded below. His full paper appeared in the Web Journal of Current Legal Issues 2009(3) in June 2009 and also in 3(1) Law and Humanities 3(1):87.

The session was blogged on hEaD space and Zeugma.

An engaging, often entertaining and highly thought provoking presentation.

— Julian Webb, ‘A falling angel’: reflecting on Day 1 of Learning in Law Annual Conference

For those who work in law schools, who teach or research in the discipline of law, the purpose of legal education is a defining issue. The question ‘what is a law school for’ has been often asked. The answers, many of which oscillate around the extent to which a legal education should or should not be geared to legal practice, are various.

Ian’s address revisited this familiar question, but with a more specific aspiration in mind – to reinvest a deeper sense of political and ethical responsibility. He identified two particular and mutually constitutive aspects to this responsibility, a private and a public:

• to the cultivation of the law student, the importance of providing an intellectual experience that does more than provide a rudimentary preparation for a legal career
• to the wider society into which law graduates are propelled

If the first responsibility chimes with Martha Nussbaum’s familiar invocation – that a university should seek to cultivate ‘humanity’ – the second revisits the classical Deweyan injunction – that a university should also recognise its public duty, to cultivate principles of social justice in a liberal democracy. Taken together these mutually constitutive responsibilities speak to a need, as urgent today as ever, to nurture within the student of law a vibrant liberal democratic imagination.

About Ian

Ian Ward is a professor of law at Newcastle Law School. He teaches and researches in legal theory, public law and European law, and has published a number of books and articles in these areas. His Law, text, terror will be published later in 2009, as will a third edition of his critically acclaimed A critical introduction to European Law (both Cambridge University Press).

Last Modified: 9 July 2010