Brexit and Law Schools – my thoughts
I attended an event at Northumbria University today. It was titled Brexit and the Law School and I was asked to contribute some thoughts on ‘Learning, Teaching and the University: The Changing Shape of the University Community’. Below is a summary of my brief talk. I’ll try and summarise the rest of the day’s discussion in another post
- Law Schools are, in my view, distinct little communities within the wider university community, within the wider local, regional and national communities and, again in my view, communities are shaped by those who inhabit them. Therefore, to understand the impact of Brexit on Law Schools we need to understand how Brexit might change the make-up of the Law School and university communities and what that change might mean on the ground
- So how will the make-up of Law School and University inhabits change post Brexit? We don’t know!
- Here’s what we do know
- UCAS figures show that applications from UK students for Law Courses for 2017 entry are up by 7% whereas applications from EU students are down 3%
- UCAS figures also show that applications from UK students across the board for 2017 entry are down by 4%, whereas applications from EU students are down by 6%
- The proportion of EU students studying law is relatively small when compared to the proportion of EU students studying some other subjects
- The number and proportion of EU students varies quite dramatically between institutions
- There is lots of anecdotal evidence that EU national academic staff are considering or actively looking to leave the UK and work elsewhere in Europe or the rest of the world
- There is also anecdotal evidence of EU nationals discounting the UK as a possible destination for work
- However there is also anecdotal evidence of EU national colleagues making plans to stay in the UK long term and also of some recruitment of EU national staff since the referendum
- The UCU survey about academics’ views on Brexit suggests that 76% of non-UK national academics are considering leaving the UK. That’s pretty damning. However, I would urge caution over that figure because ‘considering’ is very different from ‘planning to’ and the considering may be the result of quite significant uncertainty. Thing may change as we get clarification on what rights exactly will be available to our EU colleagues
4. This leads me on to what these figures don’t tell us
- Whether they are a trend or a blip. The applications for Law from EU nationals are still higher in number than for the 3 years running up to 2016 so was 2016 just a bumper year and we are returning to ‘normal’?
- What will the figures be over the next 5-10 years? Only once we know that can the data really tell us something about whether Brexit had a significant impact on the number of EU national (law) students in the UK
- If it is more than a blip, is it really Brexit or the uncertainty around Brexit that has caused the drop?
5. In short we don’t know how the make-up of Law School inhabitants might change. We really don’t. But let’s assume the worst – that we will loose the majority of our EU students and colleagues and that we will loose access to the Erasmus+ programme and research mobility/exchange programmes – what would the impact of that be? Well I think it would be devastating. I think we could see
- a shift on who and what is valued in Law Schools
- a more inward looking and insular approach to scholarship and teaching
- less engagement with EU and international issues and in particular with non-common law issues and approaches
- less well rounded curricula -explicit and hidden
- a reduction in the opportunities to learn from each other and a loss of the sort of creativity that happens when you tackle a problem together with people who bring different ways of thinking and doing things to the table
- less tolerance for different ideas and approaches and ways of thinking
- less well rounded lawyers – whether academics, practitioners or ‘just’ citizens of (a possibly much more narrowly defined) world
So my question really is – how do we make sure that we don’t become insular and inward looking law schools that irrelevant to the rest of the world or possibly just irrelevant?
The Association of Law Teachers
So, we’re heading for a general election. I don’t quite know what to say about that and anything I might say wouldn’t be exactly uplifting. Let’s therefore turn our attention to something happier and more exciting for a few moments. Last week I was at the excellent Association of Law Teachers annual conference and last week my term as Vice Chair came to an end. I became Chair.
I am excited, honoured and not just a little bit daunted to lead this amazing organisation for the next two years. In many ways the Association is my tribe, my people, the place I feel I can most be myself in this strange world we call academia. A group of people ‘passionate about legal learning’ and committed to understanding learning, teaching and all things legal education – what could be more inspiring than that? I have been a member of the Association since I got my first lectureship and have been part of the committee since shortly after that, first as Membership Secretary, then as Vice Chair and now as Chair. I have enjoyed it, learned a lot, met great people and been inspired to do my job better.
We are in exciting (is that the right word?) times. Things are changing and they are changing fast. Higher Education is changing, the legal services market is changing, legal education and training is changing – and not all for the better I would argue. All this change makes it it more important than ever that we talk to each other, learn from each other, help each other understand what is going on and what the impacts might be and that we make our voices heard. The ALT can help us all do that. Over the next two years I hope to see our membership grow. Not only will this help add power to our voice(s) and make sure the ALT continues to represent law teachers across the sectors but it will also allow us to put more back into the membership, offer more opportunities in terms of events, grants and prizes and secure our future as one of the key learned associations.
It is a genuine privilege to follow in the footsteps of the amazing Chris Ashford and fabulous Rebecca Huxley-Binns and all the other great Chairs the Association has seen over the years. I wouldn’t be able to do the job without the support of a fantastic committee of volunteers who all work unbelievably hard for the ALT. I thank them in advance for putting up with me for the next two years!
You can find more information about the Association on the website (it will be updated in due course) and you can engage with the Association on Twitter and Facebook. Please do join if you are a law teacher – at any level. The support, information, friendships and advice I got through being a member have been invaluable.
Equality and Diversity in Legal Education 3
And here’s the third and final part of my reflections on the workshop on Equality and Diversity in Legal Education. Part 1 can be found here and part 2 here.
After lunch we had another set of parallel sessions and I chaired Session 2B. The first paper picked up the theme of ‘polish’ and helping students to assimilate. Dominic De Saulles took a pragmatic view that the legal culture at the Bar is what it is and then considered our responsibilities and duties to those of our students aspiring to the bar.
He noted the significant ethical challenges we face in helping or even encouraging students to join that legal culture which might mean they have to ascribe to values they find unpalatable and lose some of their sense of self in doing so. I wasn’t entirely convinced by the Kantian ethics justification for helping students learn to pass as barristers but I need to think about this a bit more. It seems to me that what would be more valuable is to talk about resistance and how things might be changed but I also accept that for that to be possible these non-authentic lawyers need to get into the professions otherwise there is little hope of a revolution from within! Dominic had some lovely pictures on his slides and one of my favourites was this one which shows 
a court room with lots of people doing things they shouldn’t be – the defendant is pleading guilty thus depriving lawyers of income, one advocate has lost the plot and is showing emotion, another id ducking rather than standing up for his client….
The second paper was given by Elisabeth Griffiths and grappled with hierarchies of rights and protection under the Equality Act 2010 and how this might play out in employer networks. She had some really interesting data on networks (or lack of networks) and we had an interesting discussion about how effective those networks might be and how much they are just for show or for ticking boxes.
I was also interested in Elisabeth’s comments about how doing this research has impacted on her teaching and is leading her to be less doctrinal in her approach. I do think what and how we research can have an impact on how we teach certain topics. I guess this is an argument for having people teaching in areas where they are also research active but I think it probably also says something about the relationship between research and teaching more generally. I have weekend brain though so I’ll wait to think about that a bit more until I am back on working day brain!
The day finished with a roundtable with Pat Leighton asking what is special about researching equality and diversity; Charlotte O’Brien offering comments on teaching equality and diversity in the very contested Brexit context and Debra Malpass of the SRA providing some information about a call for statistical analysis and a data workshop coming up shortly (sorry I tuned out on the project call because I can’t do stats). The roundtable touched on many of the thoughts I’d had throughout the day – we need more and better information about how inequalities are playing out across legal education and training and in the professions. We need longitudinal data, we need data that is richer and deeper than a questionnaire will offer, we need high quality qualitative empirical data and we need high quality clear and comprehensive quantitative data and we need to keep talking – to each other, to our students, to those in the profession and to anyone who will listen – and, perhaps more importantly than all of those – to those who don’t want to listen. Yes, most of all we need to be talking to them!
My Conversations 