Ethnic Minorities Law Net

UKCLE PDF project

Project leader: Richard Jones, Liverpool John Moores University (e-mail: r.p.jones@livjm.ac.uk)
Project summary: dissemination of good practice on learning and teaching in a wide range of areas of law as they relate to ethnic minorities
Completion date: April 2003
UKCLE funding: £5,000

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The Ethnic Minorities Law Net project aimed to raise the profile of the law of ethnic minorities in UK law schools and to broaden perspectives on ethnic minorities and law teaching. A Web resource was created for academics and students whose subjects are affected by ethnic minority issues, developed around two principles:

• the material should be structured and presented in such a way as to be tailored to the needs of the particular user
• the language and form of the material should be appropriate

These ambitious structural requirements led the project to devote most of its resources to the development and implementation of a structured Web resource. An off the shelf system, based on a database and developed by a commercial firm, allowed different levels of user access. Some 100 documents/libraries were made available across a range of subject areas, together with case studies, learning materials and a links page listing relevant courses running in UK law schools.

It was initially intended to have online conference facilities on the site, but research data indicated that such facilities would only work if there was a minimum number of contributors (130), and it seemed unlikely the site would generate such interest from a relatively small audience. However, the site operated a sophisticated registration system, used to send mailings and to begin to develop a constituency of law teachers interested in these issues.

Additional funding for the project was secured from Liverpool John Moores University, the Home Office and the Learning and Skills Council, however this was not sufficient to sustain the site in its original form. It is planned to post the materials generated by the project on a simple data site in due course.

Considerable work still needs to be done on the format and language issues raised by this project – for discussion of these issues see the paper on the project presented at LILI 2003.

The general conclusions from the project are:

• there is little or no evidence that work in this area of ethnic minority law and the learning needs of ethnic minority students are taken on board by law schools
• there is a need for further research into how to present such material
• significant work is needed in the further education sector and in refugee areas, which would enable us to engage more meaningfully with ethnic communities.
• limited work has been undertaken on tailoring websites to deal with different users

Outcomes

• ‘Preliminary reflections on teaching about ethnic minorities in law’ – paper presented at the 2002 law subject association conferences, with a revised and updated version appearing in The Law Teacher vol 37 no 1, pp18-35
• Ethnic Minorities Law Net – paper describing the project’s rationale and progress presented at LILI 2003

Last Modified: 6 July 2010