The Legal Skills Movement Ten Years On: Triumph or Compromise?

In the past thirty years legal practice changed so significantly that a fundamental response was demanded of legal education. Making legal skills a compulsory component in the vocational stage was an incomplete response. It addressed the technical competence of lawyers but left significant gaps in professional preparation in terms of content and methodology. By focusing on the educational and pedagogic implications of the skills curriculum the clinical movement contributed to these gaps. The Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct has facilitated the consideration of a curriculum organized around a more imaginative integration of legal skills in order to begin to tackle these failings and prepare lawyers for the new economic and social challenges facing them. Solutions, however, must permeate every stage of legal education, requiring unprecedented levels of co-operation and interaction between the profession and the academy. INTRODUCTIONThe past ten years has seen a rapid incorporation of 'legal skills' into the education and training of lawyers in common law jurisdictions, particularly in the vocational stage. The theme of this article is that the structure of training to become a lawyer, usually a law degree followed by a vocational course, a period of apprenticeship, and continuing professional development, is the result of historical accidents and jursidictional compromise between the profession and the academy which allows significant gaps in professional preparation. It is argued that, in order to achieve wider objectives, including developing the values of legal practice, there is a need for continuity and integration in legal education. This calls

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

History is Past Politics: A Critique of the Legal Skills Movement in England and Wales

Boon

1998

“…The skills movement has both strongly vocational roots and tendencies, but also, at its most critical and reflexive, draws on the counterhegemonic agenda of the law clinic movement. 38 The ethics movement (such as it is) while potentially seeking to reinforce the traditional ideological and normative components of legal professionalism, has also sought to eschew a narrow vocational agenda, emphasizing the need to inculcate wider`humane values' 39 and to promote resistance to unethical practice cultures and sheer ethical indifference. 40 Similarly, socio-legal and interdisciplinary approaches, while traditionally seeking to counter the continuing dominance of legal formalism and doctrinalism, are also capable of co-option ± a Á la mode 2 ± either to utilitarian definitions of`context' in terms purely of the business or economic context of law, 41 or to the assimilation of a narrow, increasingly user-defined, policy orientation, 42 both of which may limit or even undermine the potential of the law schools as`incubators of social criticism'.…”

Section: Commodificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Postmodern Professions? The Fragmentation of Legal Education and the Legal Profession

Boon¹,

Flood²,

Webb³

2005

PrologueOver the last 30 years professions have been subject to searching critiques; nothing about them is taken for granted anymore. The legal profession, as one of the trinity of original professions, has been mired in controversy as critics have deconstructed its values and objectives. Although for some the criticism has sounded like a jeremiad and they have attempted to resurrect professions as benign markers of sociality, the agnostics are in the ascendant.1 Underpinning the social cohesion of professions with society is the educational process through which new professionals are initiated. The critique of professions has enveloped all aspects of professionalisation including education and training, which poses massive challenges to the approach to knowledge creation taken by professions. 2 In this article we consider the institutional dimensions of professionalism and the ways that the legal profession, as a modern institution, grapples with the challenges of postmodernity.Postmodern theorists observed that radical changes in socio-economic organization presented by post-industrial capitalism in the second half of the 20 th century threatened our prevailing conceptions of knowledge. As societies became bureaucratised and imbued with notions of controlled consumption, they fractured the dominant cultural and aesthetic values and revolutionised the way learning was acquired, classified, made available and exploited. 3 For Lyotard, for example, the correlation between the acquisition of knowledge and the training of minds was obsolete. 4 Furthermore, as Lyotard and Foucault hypothesised, the linkages between power and knowledge were fundamental to understanding the processes of modernization. This is perceived in Foucault's focus on the role of types of knowledge in supporting the rise of impersonal networks of disciplinary power, 5 and in Lyotard's view that knowledge is a key component in the competition for power. The article examines three aspects of the concerns thrown up by the TFR. In the first part we analyse the structure and drivers of the TFR, where they have come from and how they will be articulated. Secondly, we consider the TFR in the light of the context of the political economy of higher education and its role in the new capitalism. Finally, we examine the potential effects of the TFR for the legal profession from the perspective of deprofessionalisation and also for the Law Society itself, whether it can retain a key role in the life course of the legal profession. The Context of the Training Framework ReviewSeen in a historical perspective, the TFR proposals are evolutionary rather than Features Of The Proposed FrameworkThe TFRG's proposed outcomes are organised in four groups. Group A outcomes comprise the intellectual, analytical and problem solving skills delivered in honours degrees, together with a core of legal knowledge that reworks the current seven Although it considered that some of the Group D outcomes could only be delivered during the period of work-based learning, most were ...

“…As Julie Macfarlane has recently argued, this is an abnegation of the academic responsibility to help shape, progressively, the legal profession of tomorrow. 18 No one is better placed than the academics to make the necessary early links between reflective learning and reflective practice.…”

Section: Challenge 2: Skillsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethics for Lawyers or Ethics for Citizens? New Directions for Legal Education

Webb

1998

The Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct (ACLEC) has called for the reconstruction of the ethical foundations of legal education. However, it has not justified its premise that teaching legal values at the initial stage will enhance professional legal ethics. It is argued that the present system of education, given its technocratic, individualistic, and authoritarian tendencies, cannot meet ACLEC's challenge. A more ethical legal education can be envisaged within a neo-Aristotelian framework. This perspective emphasizes the reflexivity between micro and macro ethics, and utilizes the active and participatory learning approaches which should enable students to engage in meaningful moral discourse and problem solving.As Zygmunt Bauman has so powerfully argued, we are entering a world of modernity without illusions in which we are assailed by fin de millennium doubts and fears of moral decline. 1 Ethics has once more come to the fore in debates about the protection of the environment; the future of our communities, the education of our children, and standards in public and professional life.The recent calls for a renewal of legal ethics are symptomatic of these events, and particularly of 'the backlash against professional society'. 2 The attack by academics, by clients, consumer groups, and by state authorities antagonistic to the monopoly power of professions, has resulted in the initiation of a substantial renegotiation of the relationship between profession, state, and civil society. 3 In such an age of doubt and deregulation