Tuning legal studies: can we find 'commonality'?

In this article from the Autumn 2005 issue of Directions Julian Lonbay (University of Birmingham) reviews progress towards an overall qualifications framework for legal training in Europe. Julian is chair of the Training Committee of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe and chairperson of ELFA’s QUAACAS Committee on quality, accreditation and assessment.

This article is an abridged version of the editorial in (2005) 1 European Journal of Legal Education.

Editor’s note: A European qualification framework for social sciences: how does law fit in?, an article in the Autumn 2009 issue of Directions, provides an update to this article

European legal academics and lawyers are now seriously attempting to develop an overall qualifications framework for legal training in Europe. The need for such a framework, foreseen in the Sorbonne-Bologna process, is all the more urgent because so many of the individual parts of the training process, both academic and professional, have been, or are being, reviewed at the moment in the various member states.

The process is promoted both by pressures stemming from EC internal market law and EU programmes such as Erasmus (many students have mixed law degrees from more than one member state) as well as by the Sorbonne-Bologna process itself, which is having a significant impact on the structure of university level studies across Europe.

From the point of view of the European legal professions it is considered necessary that from the first day in practice lawyers should meet the professional standards expected by the public. With cross border practice and multi-qualified ‘integrated’ lawyers a reality in Europe, and with the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) common code of conduct for such practice being updated, it is timely for the Council to consider a common minimum standard for the training of lawyers and to recognise those elements of national training that are already common.

At the EU level much has already been achieved in terms of enabling the trans-European practice of law. In addition to the establishment and services directives, the mutual recognition directive mandated, since the early 1990s, that Bars and Law Societies should have established mechanisms that enable assessment of individual candidates against a list of knowledge, skills and competencies needed by the national lawyer. A forthcoming consolidating Directive was adopted by the Council on 6 June 2005. The Morgenbesser case took this further, meaning that ‘would-be’ lawyers who are not finally qualified as a member of a legal profession can request access to local legal training, and the consolidating directive allows for pan-EC professional bodies to develop ‘common platforms’ in training to assist free movement of professionals.

In the light of all these factors the CCBE Training Committee has decided to look at the outcomes of the training process in terms of knowledge, skills and competencies expected in the member states of their legal professions. It is hoped that this process will highlight some of the commonalities, rather than the differences that we all too easily see when looking at existing training regimes in terms of inputs.

The European Law Faculties Association (ELFA), through its QUAACAS Committee on quality, accreditation and assessment, is in the process of appointing national representatives whose task will be to coordinate and gather national responses to a questionnaire that will seek to devise a set of identifiable common European learning outcomes for legal studies at university level. A full pan-European consultation exercise will be launched in autumn 2005 after discussion of the methodology and competences at a specially convened conference meeting in Bilbao. The committee will be taking advantage of the experience gained in the Tuning Project into ‘tuning’ educational structures in Europe.

A competency-based approach should help the CCBE to reach ‘agreement’ on (at least some of) the outcomes of training for all European lawyers, and will help to make it easier for lawyers to be recognised throughout the EEA via the directive mechanisms, but also through use of the new Morgenbesser route.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010