A profile of Avrom Sherr

Profile of Avrom Sherr, Woolf Professor of Legal Education and Director of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in the School of Advanced Study at the University of London and Chair of UKCLE’s Advisory Board and Strategy Committee, from the Autumn 2007 issue of Directions.

Avrom’s distinguished legal academic career began at Warwick, where he was a pioneer of clinical legal education. His wide experience also includes five years at Liverpool, where he developed research into the legal profession, and teaching at a number of US law schools, including UCLA, the University of San Francisco, New York Law School and Touro College.

Among Avrom’s varied academic interests are the development of legal education, the sociology of the legal profession, professional ethics, professional competence, legal services delivery and public funding for legal services. He has written in the field of human rights generally, and specifically on freedom of protest, rights to religious observance and rights of people with HIV/AIDS. Avrom has been a member of the Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct, the Judicial Studies Board Ethnic Minorities Advisory Committee and the Race Relations and Equal Opportunities Committees of the Law Society. He is currently a member of the Advisory Board for the Legal Services Complaints Commissioner, and acts as a consultant to government and professional bodies on access to justice and professional training issues.

He gave a keynote address at Learning in Law Annual Conference 2008, with the title Language cuckoos, cultural hegemony and legal education in the EU: the ‘commonisation’ of European law’.

Q&A

What challenges do you see for the future of legal education in the UK, and what role do you see for UKCLE in addressing those challenges?

Legal education in the UK is facing many challenges in a fast changing world. There is insufficient money for higher education, and the beneficial attempt to bring more people into higher education without funding them and their education properly is a cause for concern for the future if not today. UKCLE is obviously not in any position to change this state of affairs, but a better recognition of the situation across the sector would be useful, and taking this into account is essential in all areas of its work.

The system for the regulation of lawyers is changing, and the new system does not yet allow sufficient involvement from academics in the process. Decisions made about qualifying law degrees, the new training framework and law firms’ own Legal Practice Courses all reflect on the way in which university legal education is carried out. We need a strong and continuing presence on the bodies which make the final decisions on these issues. This is not an area in which UKCLE has been sufficiently represented yet, and it would be good to hear its voice in the appropriate places.

The massive changes in the technology of legal information demand different approaches to teaching, researching and understanding law. We have hardly begun to address these problems and bring ourselves into the new world. We must adapt our teaching and what we teach to new knowledge horizons. UKCLE has already been at the forefront in some areas of change, and technology is certainly one of them, through its fostering of the virtual world of the SIMPLE project. More blowing of its own trumpet on this item would be a good idea.

In your opinion what factors are necessary to the further development and recognition of legal education scholarship in the UK? And what do you see as UKCLE’s role?

I would like to see more research on law, lawyers and legal education coming out of the current revisiting of socio-legal work by the Socio-Legal Studies Association. We need to know far more about the changing make up of the students and lawyers who will be so important in looking after the legal needs of people and organisations in our changing economy, environment and world. We should also be doing far more to bring the scholarship of education itself into the postgraduate curriculum for all those who wish to teach law. In order to do this we must carry out the necessary research to link the information which exists in relation to other subject areas into our own, because lawyers are often reluctant to listen to learning relating to other disciplines. UKCLE has carried the flag for this since its inception. It does an excellent job bringing education scholarship to the troops of teachers. Tied in with the excellent new LLM on Legal Education at Warwick, it should be possible now to take this issue further as an acceptable research option.

If you could change one thing about UK higher education, what would it be?

I would try to fund it better.

Finally, which person inspires you most, and why?

The person who most inspires me is my late father. For most of his life he worked for a large merchanting company in the centre of London, but his delight was to be involved in teaching, which he did almost as a pastime, and part time, for some 40 years. He taught children in evening and Sunday religious school (cheder). He was a ‘born teacher’, and could well have taught anything, but he had left school to look after his mother and family very soon after his father died when he was 14. Soon after that came the War, and very little opportunity to continue any further learning.

He loved the awakening of intellect, the dawn of understanding, especially in children. He knew three things which I believe are an essential part of teaching at any level – patience, encouragement and silence. He was never judgemental, but the subjects of his silence could tell you worlds of feeling. He knew that everybody has intellect and emotion, and that both could be combined into the production of good ideas and work and understanding, but that the key to one person’s understanding might not be the same as that of the next person. Sometimes it is important as a teacher just to wait. Not everyone can answer or understand instantly, and sometimes a slower development may be more complete and more deep.

In later years I would recount my day to him by phone during my journey home. I miss that most of all. Not that he would say very much – just the odd question here and there. But his ability to listen taught me more as a researcher, as a lawyer, as a teacher and as a parent than anything else.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010