The costs of legal education

How can law schools make the most of their resources? This editorial from the Spring 2002 issue of Directions outlines some innovative approaches designed to help ensure that new ideas can become rooted in practice in every law school.

The model of finance adopted for legal education is rooted in the belief that law is taught by ‘chalk and talk’, and that the only ‘resources’ needed by law students are books. This has meant that historically law has suffered from being given the lowest amount of resource per student by the funding councils. Leaving aside the pedagogical inadequacies of such a model, financially it has become unsustainable in the face of increasing student numbers.

Law schools have responded in several ways, some more conducive to effective learning and teaching practice than others. For example, there has been a tendency to increase class sizes and reduce tutorial frequency. Other responses have included recruiting overseas students as a lucrative source of additional income. Several law schools have gone into business providing a range of services at commercial rates including professional postgraduate provision, distance learning, franchising and short course provision. Significant numbers of academics (although not their law schools) benefit from consultancies and private practice. The City Solicitors’ Educational Trust provides additional resources for law schools. After an initial period when the Trust emphasised ‘traditional’ teaching, there has recently been greater support for innovation in funded projects. Some law schools have benefited from sponsorship by law firms and others. Some have bid successfully for a variety of learning development projects either individually or collectively.

An even more welcome development has been a variety of innovations in learning, including experiential learning approaches, such as live and simulated clinics, and problem-based learning. Information technologies have provided a new impetus for learning development, with lecturers encouraging students to browse the vast resources available in cyberspace, use multimedia courseware such as Iolis, develop Web-based course material, or engage in a variety of forms of online collaborative learning including negotiation exercises and legal clinics. Such changes in teaching and learning are supported by changes in forms of administration, supervision, assessment and reflectivity among students through the use of virtual learning environments and personal development planning. A variety of forms of self and auto-assessment promote changes away from traditional examination systems.

So it is not all doom and gloom. It is possible to teach in an innovative way within existing resources. UKCLE can help with this by ensuring the generalisation of innovative activity across law schools, thus cutting out any tendency to reinvent wheels. We can also assist in developing partnerships and collaboration between law schools, thereby spreading the resource costs of any development work.

For example, courseware development can be quite expensive when done by an individual academic or law school, but the costs can be spread more reasonably among the whole academic community, as has been the case with Iolis. Careful use of forms of technology can enable previously unaffordable forms of learning – as is being shown by the Glasgow Graduate School of Law in its innovative use of virtual clinics. However, almost all these initiatives require an initial investment in resources.

The first task is therefore to ensure the effective marshalling of the initial investment. Over the years, some law schools and academics have become expert at obtaining resources from their own universities and other funding sources. A second and equally important task is to ensure the effective evaluation of the costs of any teaching/learning approach. This is not to propose Birtian accountancy, but more to promote a rational look at what is do-able. Implementation research can play an important role here. Thirdly, the most important requirement is to collaborate to ensure that the unit of resource for law is made realistic. Otherwise, the danger is that learning and teaching innovations will remain laboratory experiments rather than generally accepted good practice.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010