Law school dreams: imagining the shape of law schools

Roger Burridge (University of Warwick), Imelda Maher and John O’Dowd (University College Dublin) led an interactive session devoted to thinking about the physical shape of law schools.

The law school building, because we invariably inherit it, is largely taken for what we have received. If we could dream a law school, what would it look like? What spaces would it contain? How would it feel? This session was a chance to express such fantasies – from the outside and looking in.

The session aimed to encourage thinking and ideas about the environment for legal learning. A number of law schools, particularly in the common law world, are contemplating or have recently embarked upon new law school buildings. There has also been interest in the UK focusing upon the shape and design of learning spaces. The session presented an opportunity to discuss the relationship between the form and usages of the physical structure of the law school and the values, priorities and interests of/for those whom it seeks to involve.

In the interactive part of the session participants were provided with coloured pens and sheets of A3 paper and asked to complete two tasks:

Task 1: What would your dream law school look like?
You are invited to visualise the look of your ideal law school building. There are no specific requirements for its shape or structure – just draw its appearance from the outside and include some explanation of your design beside it. Some questions that might be considered are:

• Who will use it?
• Where will it be?
• Who is the building addressing?
• What does it say?
• What might it say?
• What is ‘legal’ about it?
• How does it express itself?

This task should be done fairly quickly and should last no longer than ten minutes.

Task 2: What is the colour of learning?
What would the inside of your dream law school look like? In groups of three or four design the biggest space in the building. It is a space roughly 50 metres long and 20 metres wide and is to be devoted entirely to student learning/teaching. Before you start each member should show their dream of the outside of a law school to the other members of the group.

In designing the space you are free to include anything regardless of cost. Some questions that might be considered include:

• What will it feel like?
• What will happen in the space?
• Who is the space to be used by?
• What will it contain?
• How will people behave in it?
• How will people communicate in it?

This task will take longer and at least 20 minutes needs to be allowed.

John’s slides are embedded below. In conclusion Imelda offered the following thoughts, reflecting on the experience of planning a new law building for the University College Dublin Sutherland School of Law:

“We conceive of the new building as a gateway and not a gatekeeper; we see space as something which is not (intellectually) neutral.
 
A key issue for us in thinking about and planning the building is how can the users read the space so each of them can say the following?

1. I know what I can do here (rules).
2. I know I belong here (community).
3. What I do here is important (commitment).
4. I can experiment here (opportunity).

In making these statements, each user is led to the conclusion: This is my place.

Temple (2007) points to four different conceptions of space:

1. Space as meaning – for us, this is about the building fostering a community of scholars, students and a wider community of graduates, professionals and policymakers.
2. Space as engagement – this has two elements – functionality and imagination, which require flexibility. In terms of space Temple sees this as creating the need for ‘islands of reflection’, group sites (pods) and semi-private meeting spaces for different kinds of engagement by users.
3. Space as supporting Drawing on Bourdieu, Temple sees this as ensuring that those in the building have a sense of place and being in it. This in practical terms requires micro-design and specification of spaces in the building and how they are used. He also reminds us of academic and student commitment to traditional pedagogy – this is still part of the story and should not be forgotten. He also suggests that as IT develops it has fewer special needs.
4. Space as living – the building will provide space for learning and for ‘hanging out’ but should also provide a catalytic ‘third place’ where serendipitous interactions can take place.
    
   On a very practical note, Temple highlights the research finding that a well maintained building is important for learning.
    
   Finally, the guiding principles for design in our case, are community, flexibility and light.”

Further reading on learning spaces

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• Long P & Holeton R (2009) Signposts of the revolution? What we talk about when we talk about learning spaces EDUCAUSE Review 44(2):36-49
• Jamieson P, Dane J & Lippman P (2005) Moving beyond the classroom: accommodating the changing pedagogy of higher education (PDF file) (Refereed Proceedings of 2005 Forum of the Australasian Association for Institutional Research)
• Temple P (2007) Learning spaces for the 21st century: a review of the literature York: Higher Education Academy

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Richard de Friend (College of Law) reports:
John and Imelda have been closely involved in a project replacing UCD’s current law school accommodation – a castle, the chapel of which (confession boxes included until recently) served as a lecture theatre – with a state of the art building.

In an era when so many HE buildings are procured via off the peg ‘design build’, and those that are not often look, feel and most importantly function as if they had been, UCD’s approach seems inspiringly bespoke, as well as aesthetically sensitive.

John and Imelda have been given the time and space, not only to collaborate closely with the architects and with them to visit examples of successful law school design around the world, but also, as their presentations amply demonstrated, to think through the complex interplay of social, pedagogic, and, granted the importance of form, structure and appearance to law, symbolic considerations which are entailed in a project of this kind.

Among others suggested by their presentation and by contributions from the floor are:

• What role, if any, has the traditional organisation of educational space, with all its hierarchies and rigidities, to play in an era supposedly committed to flexible student centred, Web enabled learning?
• How far do/should academics still require protected individual and communal domains, when so much of their output depends increasingly on collaboration with colleagues, informal, even distant, interaction with students, and the use of ever more smart and sophisticated ICT?
• On the other hand, is it any easier to conceive of a law school without walls than it is a legal system without rules?

Having been briefed by John and Imelda, participants, working in groups and ably dragooned by Roger, were asked to produce their outline ideas for the internal and external design of UCD’s new building. It must say something about the potential of open plan teamwork that, within 10 minutes, one group had come up with a scheme incorporating a somewhat suggestively shaped ivory tower, another a two humped roof (because, being an academic building, it had been designed by a committee), and a third an external safe in which to deposit creative ideas, to ensure that none would enter the building and disrupt the REF production line.

There seems every prospect that UCD law school will have a superb building of which it, and the whole of Dublin’s legal community, will be very proud, and which the rest of us will greatly envy.

About the presenters

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Roger Burridge has written widely on legal education and the role of law schools in development. He was director of UKCLE from 2000 to 2005 and head of Warwick School of Law from 2005 to 2008.
 
Imelda Maher is academic director for the UCD Sutherland School of Law building. She has used the experience of working with interdisciplinary design teams and disparate stakeholders to reflect on the relationship between space, learning and scholarship and the meanings surrounding those spaces from inside and outside (however one describes those).
 
John O’Dowd has taught law in UCD Law School since 1991 and recently served for a year as the school’s head of teaching and learning. Since 2007 he has worked with Imelda to provide the academic input into the design of the new Sutherland UCD School of Law building and collaborated with the UCD Buildings Office and the project architects and engineers.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010