The Law Teacher: The International Journal of Legal Education

Last month, Professor Chris Ashford and I stepped down as General Editors of The Law Teacher and handed over the journal to Dr Emma Jones. Honestly, it’s a funny feeling. The Law Teacher has given me so much over the course of my career, working with Chris has been such a joy and such a rich learning experience and in one way or the other I have always somehow worked on something related to the Law Teacher. I wasn’t going to write anything beyond a quick tweet to mark the occasion but since then, my time linked to the Law Teacher keeps popping into my head.

I published my first book review in the Law Teacher in Issue 1 of 2008, just a few months after starting my first lectureship. I published my first article in the Law Teacher in 2009 (Issue 2) – A Case for Timeturners. I look back on that paper now it and it is somehow completely naive and yet hopeful at the same time. I should maybe write an update. The Editorial of Issue 1 of 2010 welcomes me (and others) to the board and I had forgotten that Chris and I joined at the same time. Over the next few years I had a go at editing book reviews as well as the Policy and Educational Developments sections. Then in 2014, Chris took over as General Editor of the journal and I joined as his Deputy. I remember thinking that I really wasn’t quite sure how I had found myself in that position and hoped that nobody would notice that I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing. in 2018 I got the chance to edit my first special issue (a reflection on the Legal Education and Training Review and a great change to critique the thinking on the SQE as it was then).

We found our feet fairly quickly, we did battle with Editorial Manager, our new online submission system (and if it is possible for a system to actively dislike a person, EM hated me) and we sort of dealt with stuff that came up. We bounced ideas off each other, stepped in to support each other, sense checked each other and reminded each other that we’d also need other voices because we are too similar in our approach to most things. We expanded the editorial board, we established a peer review college, we drove up the quality of work submitted and published and we actively tried to support the legal education community through workshops and being available for conversations. We introduced social media editors to raise the profile of the journal…We did a lot. It’s hard to know now where the ideas came from, I would probably say Chris but actually maybe it was the combination that worked and we had a fantastic team who made the magic happen (and still do).

I think we’ve always care about our authors as much as our readers (because often they are the same!). We read submissions with care and encouraged our reviewers to do the same and respond with constructive kindness. Reading work submitted to a journal is a huge privilege, the author is trusting you with it, probably feels anxious about how it will be received, wants you to like it and in return you get to shape it a little, help make it better, sometimes encourage the re-think it needs to be amazing. We did all of this, mostly without major glitches and mostly just getting on with it – although we definitely had our moments… and then Covid hit.

Lots happened in that time that showcased the nasty side of academia but also the kindness of colleagues, friends and strangers and to cut a long, horrible and for most other people rather boring story short, I wasn’t well. I tried to keep functioning but I wasn’t. As is so often the case in situations like that, I tried to first resign from all the nice things, the things that actually made it possible for me to survive in academia. Chris and the Law Teacher Team encouraged me to stay on, just step back and take the time I needed. When I returned I returned as Co-General Editor alongside Chris with a strengthened and fabulous Editor Team. And now, 10 years after working on the first issue as General and Deputy Editor, we have delivered our final issue as Co-Editors. 10 years just flew by and now there is a Law Teacher shaped hole appearing in my working life – appearing slowly because I haven’t vanished from the journal. For a start both Chris and I stay on as Consultant Editors but I am also seeing through the articles that happened to still be assigned to me and I am also co-editing a Special Issue (more on that another time – it’s shaping up to be fabulous though). The journal is in safe hands with a brilliant team of editors now led by Emma so I am excited to see what the future holds for the Law Teacher and what it feels like to view it as just another academic interested in legal education.