Plenary: Legal education and the legal services market

Julian Webb (UK Centre for Legal Education)

abstract | presentation | biography

This presentation was a plenary session at the 2010 conference: Moving forward: Legal education in Scotland

Abstract

The Legal Services Act 2007 is already bringing about substantial change to the legal services market in England and Wales. The passage of the Legal Services (Scotland) Act 2010 confirms a similar course for the legal services market in Scotland. Recent reviews of legal education in both jurisdictions could be seen as attempts by the professional bodies to ensure that their systems of education and training are ready for the new competitive environment. However, in England and Wales, the recent announcement of a ‘regulators’ review’ of legal education and training is evidence that the real debate about the latter’s ‘fitness for purpose’ is only just beginning. While it may be argued that this in part reflects specific ‘failures’ of the earlier professional reviews in that jurisdiction, this paper argued that the Legal Services Act has wrought a fundamental transformation to professional discourses about the role of legal education. Legal education is becoming a key component of professional regulation, as ‘fitness for purpose’ becomes (re)defined as fitness to meet the regulatory objectives of the Legal Services Act.

The Legal Services (Scotland) Act contains a similar set of regulatory objectives. Consequently this paper concludes by exploring the possible role of and challenges for legal education, in both jurisdictions, in meeting the regulatory objectives, particularly those of protecting the interests of consumers and promoting competition, promoting access to justice, a strong and diverse legal profession, and promoting and maintaining adherence to ‘professional principles’ and ethics.

Presentation

Biography

Professor Julian Webb is Director of the UKCLE and Professor of Legal Education at Warwick Law School. His current research focuses primarily on values in the law curriculum, and the political and moral economy of legal education and legal practice. He teaches courses in legal methods, philosophy of law, and the foundations of socio-legal theory. Julian’s publications include the monograph, Professional Legal Ethics: Critical Interrogations (Oxford, 1999) co-authored with Donald Nicolson, University of Strathclyde, and Maughan & Webb’s Lawyering Skills and the Legal Process (2nd ed., Cambridge, 2005). He is on the editorial boards of the International Journal of the Legal Profession, Commonwealth Law and Legal Education, Revista de Educación y Derecho and Legal Ethics, and, until 2008, was a founding editor of the latter. Within his work for UKCLE, Julian is currently leading for the Centre on the ‘Toolkit for Law Teachers’ project.

Last Modified: 10 March 2011