SLS Day 3
Day three started with me being lazy! I couldn’t be bothered to go out and run. It looked quite lovely outside but I had ideas swirling round in my head and wanted to play with them and have a slower morning. A cup of tea would have been nice but in student accommodation you just can’t have everything. I played with ideas for a while – I have too much going on in my paper and I know it all fits together somehow but I can’t quite articulate it. Then I vaguely considered running after all and joining the fun run but remembered just in time that I actually don’t like running with people. I spoke to Kath and then went for breakfast and continued playing with ideas but didn’t really get anywhere. I bought myself a cafe mocha and headed back to the room, finished the self care blog post and then headed for the AGM.
The AGM was efficient and smooth and included the election of a new Vice President. I was a little disappointed that the choice was between three white men and spent some time reflecting on diversity at the conference. It doesn’t feel as dominated by white old men as I remember previous conferences but there is still a little too much white men in suits talking to white men in suits going on – though that might just be me not being quite ready to admit that maybe the SLS is not as stuffy as I thought it was. As part of the AGM/Council Meeting session Joanne Conaghan gave a presentation on the REF. There wasn’t much there I didn’t already know but I think the key message (which I agree with) was this: Get yourself REF literate! And if you don’t know where to start with that, have a look here.
I headed straight for the Legal Education stream then which began with a keynote from Fiona Cownie. It’s no secret that she is one of my greatest role models, has been a fantastic mentor and has taught me so much about navigating the, shall we say challenges, of university life. I love listening to her speak. For a start it vaguely takes me back to being an undergrad student and I often chuckle at how much of my large group teaching style is modeled on how I remember hers; then her presentations are always told as a sort of story which is easy to follow, logical, coherent, thought through properly and fun. Today she was taking a look at the history of legal education research. I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation and am pleased to report that I am in fact a political scientist after all:
The next paper was by Lydia Bleasdale and Sarah Humphreys and focused on trigger warnings. I have heard Lydia talk about her resilience research before and the full report is worth taking a look at. This paper focused on a couple of questions the students were asked and I think it really highlighted that most of what we know about trigger warnings is fake news. There is, as they argued, a moral panic around this and that is probably fueled by misconceptions about what trigger warnings are. I actually haven’t given trigger warnings much thought – at least not in the sense of actually calling them that. I do think it is useful for students to know what topics will be discussed/considered so that they can choose how to engage with material they know might have a negative impact on them. To me giving information that helps students better prepare on an emotional and intellectual level for an academic discussion of issues can only be a good thing. What is clear is that much more research is needed here and that the trigger warning stories perpetuated in the media provide lovely teaching materials for the importance of checking your sources properly.
Rossana Deplano then presented her experience from an action research project looking at using concept maps in Public Law teaching. A number of things struck me – Leicester have 6-8 students in tutorials. Wow. Oh my goodness that’s a different universe. I mean that’s how I remember it at Leicester but I presumed it would have changed and the groups would now be bigger. I was also struck by how many of the things Rossana was describing she did in her tutorials that used concept maps are things I often do instinctively in the classroom. I often end up drawing diagrams to try and show links
This could so easily have been my session
between ideas and principles and to work through theoretical ideas and practical problems. I encourage students to do the same and I used to capture may of our joint efforts and share them with other groups on the VLE – I haven’t done that for a while but it’s powerful because it often demonstrates variety of equally valid approaches to the same question, issue or idea. Any way, I’m off to read a bit more about concept maps.
I chatted with lovely people over lunch and then went for coffee with Lisa Webley, another fabulously generous lovely woman who has given up her time again and again to help me figure out how this crazy world of higher education operates. Talking to her was just brilliant and I now have a much clearer picture of quite a few things in my head. Sometimes it really does help hearing someone else articulate what you do really already know but can’t quite grasp hold of. Thank you!
After Lunch Avrom Sherr asked whether legal education research was really about legal education and concluded that legal education was a never ending debate. It was a whistle stop tour through lots of contested questions and issues in legal education and it was kind of fun.
The next presentation was perhaps the one that fit least into the broader discussions we were having about legal education. It was all a bit too business-y and employability-ish and bit ‘yay cash prize’ etc for me. I stopped really listening although I think there could have been some really interesting stuff in there about the nature of learning.
The final paper was by Caroline Gibby on Liminality and morphogenesis and I really really wish this hadn’t been the last paper of the day because I was flagging a little. This stuff is messy in a good way and thinking about the transformation of (legal) educators is interesting and important and I do think what Caroline was getting at is probably right (if I understand her correctly that is) – some legal educators feel locked into narrow roles where opportunities for development are minimal and thus limit the overall progression or evolution of a particular context. I need to go back over the notes I took, her abstract and look at some of the literature Caroline cited to help me think about this some more but I think there are answers to some of my tricky questions in there somewhere.
After the session I went for food with my ALT vice Chair Caroline Strevens to talk about
some ALT stuff and now I am back in my little room and really not far off going to bed (It’s about 9.30pm). I am beginning to have a sense of what I want to say tomorrow and I think sleep and a morning run will do far more good than trying to finalise it completely now.
Day three was good, day three has, it occurred to me walking back to my room through the London drizzle, been genuinely good for the soul.
SLS Day 2
SLS Day 2 commenced after a pretty poor night’s sleep. It needed to be good. Day one set the bar pretty high (oops, already used that pun on Twitter yesterday – can I get away with it twice given that it’s not quite as obvious a pun unless you read the tweet and/or my account of yesterday?). Anyway poor night’s sleep – The usual London dilemma – I had to choose between being too hot or it being too noisy. I am such a country girl, I just can’t deal with the city noise, it just really gets to me so – too hot it was. I gave up trying to sleep at 5.30am and sat up sleepily and sweaty. Given that I was already sweaty I thought I didn’t really have an excuse to not go for a run. I pulled my gear on and headed out and had a lovely little 2.5 ish mile trot out along the Regents Canal.
Breakfast was a bit meh so on the way to the first session I bought a coffee that actually looked, smelled and tasted like coffee. The first session was my random session. I always have at least one at every big conference I go to. For this one I chose the Legal History Stream which started with a paper by Ann Lyon (Plymouth) talking about ‘It Wasn’t Just About the Suffragettes. The Representation of the People Act 1918 and the Realities of Voting in the 1918 Election. I loved this paper because it combined an analysis of the Act set in its historical context with personal stories from Ann’s family. It was a lovely example of being able to touch history through those lovely family connections and thinking through what the 1918 Act would have meant for those family members. That paper was followed by one from Judith Bourne with a great presentation on Bertha Cave who applied to join Gray’s Inn in 1903. I was struck by how little we know about her as a woman and Judith pointed out how she has sort of been decontextualised and isolated from her environment with a dehumansing effect. She is known as an unsuccessful almost first woman lawyer. I found the analysis of the reasons for prohibiting women from joining the legal professions interesting too and I don’t think that these been consigned to history. The culture at the bar is one of tradition and order and strict rules based on the English class system and a specific form of masculinity. Allowing anyone from the 
‘wrong’ background in threatens that order. First women, then working class folk, where will it end… Somehow this doesn’t sounds like we’re talking 100 years ago. Outsiders are indeed a little troubling, aren’t they. The third paper was by Janet Weston who looked at the history if measuring mental capacity. I was still wrapped up in the first two papers that I lost focus through this one. It was a great paper with lovely stories of those involved in mental capacity cases and I was struck by how often a lack of mental capacity had nothing to do with the person whose capacity was supposedly in question but was about protecting women from others who might take advantage of them… I wish I had kept more focused because there was so much good stuff in there.
As I walked back to the publisher exhibition area and, importantly, coffee I was reflecting on the on how fabulous it was to be able to go to random sessions and listen to things that are slightly out of my area of expertise. It allows me to think about things in a slightly different way and prompts ideas about my own work. Conferences are actually really important to improve thinking. I had a quick coffee, picked up a couple of publisher’s lists with discount codes and then headed back over to the Law building for a 
Practice, Profession and Ethics session. I must walk round with my eyes shut or lost in deep thought most of the time because it was on this walk over that I registered that the ‘square’ I’d now walked past at least 6 times was in fact a graveyard. I like graveyards. I wished I could linger and explore it more but the session called. For those interested it is the Novo Cemetery, a jewish cemetery and you can read all about it here. It’s somehow quite moving. On my way back after the session I looked at it from the windows of each floor of the building as I came down the stairs. It has quite a powerful pull and somehow triggered an emotional reaction before I knew anything at all about it.
The first paper in that session was presented by Caroline Gibby (co-authored with Amanda Newby and Lisa Down) and was on Integrating Professional and Ethical Contexts. There was some great stuff here about the need to keep discussions about ethics and codes of conduct separate and about the value and pitfalls of narrative pedagogy. I like the idea of teaching ethics by stealth and there are lots of ways this can possibly be done throughout the legal curriculum and in professional/clinic settings. I wonder whether we actually need to start with thinking through what sort of ethics and values teaching we do through the explict as well as the hidden curriculum and then 
maybe make that more explicit. I like the notion of supporting students to become confident independent thinkers. I think this might be the key to lots of things. I need to think about this more though.
Next up was Richard Collier talking about wellbeing in the legal community and focusing on the group least is known about: us; legal academics. There is so much in his paper that resonates and that links to many themes I have been thinking about. I don’t want to steal his thunder and I hope the paper is published soon but here is a very brief summary of the argument followed by some thoughts:
- The literature points to lawyers (as in practitioners) just getting by – I think this sounds familiar in terms of the academy
- We still actually know very little about the private life of university law schools but we do know some things about other areas of the academy and law schools, while possibly unique in terms of being able to withstand some of the pressures facing Higher Education generally ( and I am not that convinced that they are all that different from other disciplines), law schools are not immune to those factors
- Metrics, hyper performance and acceleration are coming together to create a menta health crisis in the (legal) academy
- There are pockets of resistance – we need to slow the university down!
- And we need to be crtical of the wellbeing movement – challenge the narrative of resilience and also of the hapiness industry.
Thoughts: I agree wholeheartedly with every single word Richard said. The marketised university creates an environment and setting where good mental health is almost impossible but where the responsibility of having and maintaining good mental health is put solely on us and when we inevitably fail on that we do so because we are not resilient enough (in my case probably because I haven’t completed my online resilience training). But resilience should surely be about crisis or particular difficulties. Resilience is not about getting through normal every day life. The problem is that we have normalised overwork, perfomance metrics and all that other crap. There were links in the paper to my work on excellence and on academic indentity and the paper also raised questions for me about what, as educators, we role model for our students. My brain is still working on this and thoughts pop in and out my head.
Lunch was, like breakfast, a bit meh. Hot food just doens’t work for these sorts of things – do decent wraps, sarnies, salad etc. Much better. Then, rather ambitiously I think, the organisers put two plenaries in the afternoon. The first was Access to Justice in Troubled Times chaired by Mr Justice Robert Knowles with contributions from Mrs Justice Maura McGowan, Dame Hazel Genn and Professor John Fitzpatrick. The rather depressing message from that session was the our justice system is falling apart, access to justice is basically non-existent for many and that law schools are not only providing invaluable service to individuals who seek advice and support in university law clinics but are basically also propping up the system, a system which Maura likened to the NHS – the 
bulk of the work and the most emotive work is being done by those judges working in the most difficult conditions. As Maura said in response to one of the questions- ‘in an ideal world you would not have UG students providing legal advice… but because we’re in the state we’re in, it has to work’. There may be some hope with a move to more of the work being moved online but like Hazel I am a little sceptical and like Hazel I hope the powers that be will collect or allow the collection of data that will allow the research community to fully evaluate the changes being made. We have to do better.
While the speakers were interesting I found the panel overall odd. Too much ‘men in suits talking’ at the end and the Chair was directing the questions/conversation in an odd way and limiting the audience participation which made it slightly uncmfortable to watch. I was in need of coffee. As I was walking over somone I only know from Twitter caught up with me and said hi so it was great to meet properly and we chatted over coffee and then headed to the second plenary of the afternoon. The Rule of Law in troubled times. I was
flagging a little and my brain was quite full but I enjoyed all three papers even if they all over ran leaving almost no time for questions or comments at the end. I liked Renata Uits’s point that there is a key difference between Rule of Law and Rule by Law but that the line between the two is really only easy to draw with hindsight. She was talking mostly about the Polish and Hungarian context and attacks on judicial independence, a theme which Murray Hunt returned to. I think she is right in saying that the rule of law is vulnerable to abuse because it is an abstract concept that lawyers talk about and it is difficult to translate into practice, it easily slips into rule by law and constitutional engineering the like of which we are currently seeing across the world – Murray gave examples in addition to the central and eastern European examples but I have now forgotten them.
Thom Brooks spoke about the rule of law in the US and there were really no surprises there. Trump talks about support for the rule of law but only really in terms of immigration and walls and what he really means is strict law enforcement (but not against him or his friends). He quoted Bob Dreyfuss saying ‘Never before … has a president so openly challenged the legitimacy of the entire justice system’.
Throughout the plenary I was struck that this was such a legal panel. I missed the political science discussions on this which I have been able to dip into more recently attending political science events. I missed the more critical approach to terms like populism and democracy and also rule of law actually. I felt a little alien in my own discipline because I realised that we’re using the same words but mean slightly different things, or understand them differently, but that the political science meaning is more familiar to me, and more meaningful, because those are the debates I have engaged in. Maybe I’ll make a half decent politcal scientist yet.
So that was that. My brain is full. I am not going to the conference dinner (something about dinner at the Inns makes me feel deeply uncomfortable and I’m not paying a small fortune to feel deeply uncomfortable) so a quick trip to the Co-op later and I have provisions for the evening and vague ideas about just chilling out doing nothing at all – or maybe catching up on things I never get round to like sorting out this blog a bit, filing some stuff (electronically) or just reading a few of those articles I have been meaning to read for ages.
More tomorrow!
Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) conference Day 1
I have not been to a Society of Legal Scholars conference for some time. I was looking forward to it. I was particularly excited to be able to go to all of the conference rather than just the half in which my paper was scheduled. I am doing 2 papers in the Legal Education section – more on those another time.
Travel to London was uneventful. I like uneventful. I got a fair bit of work done on the train in spite of the supposed quiet coach being the noisiest coach I have been in for a long time. Is it the thing where you’re told you’re not allowed to do something and therefore immediately want to do it? I got the tube out to Mile End and found the campus and even the right building very quickly. I also managed to get a ticket for the dinner at the end of day 1. I hadn’t booked because I wasn’t going to go but then the opportunity for a catch up with Richard C arose so I really wanted to go.
I had arrived in time for lunch – a rather ordinary pasta with a veggie sauce (I think there was a chicken one too) and then I headed to the first session. The first paper was great. I expected it to be. It was a paper by Marc Mason (Westminster) and Steven Vaughan (UCL) reporting on their research with LGBT+ barristers in England and Wales. Bonus points if you ‘get’ the title ‘Going to the Gay Bar, Gay Bar, Gay Bar…’ (if you do, your taste in music is as horrendous as mine!). The paper was fascinating and sort of heartbreaking and a little puzzling…. For a start the survey Marc and Steven did shows quite clearly that the Bar Standards Board statistics on sexuality at the Bar are hugely underestimating the number of LGBT+ barristers across the levels. That in itself means that there is something going on there because some are clearly happy to take part in surveys and interviews for research purposes but are not happy to declare their sexuality as part of the BSB statistics reporting. I wonder why that is. The paper’s sections on homophobia and on the performance of being out were fascinating. The data shows that homophobia is quite common but also that barristers play it down as nothing serious and no big deal. I’m really interested in this lack of advocating for themselves. Where does this come from. Is this a professional thing? Do they advocate for each other? This is fascinating and I’m not sure how we’d get to the bottom of this fully. I’ll ponder this.
I loved the notion that came up in one of the quotes about challenging or disrupting the ‘normal rule of engagements’. So men (mostly) finding it difficult to work out what exactly is going on when faced with a powerful lesbian QC, knowing something is slightly ‘off’ and not being able to work out what the rules of engagement now are. I like that. The section on performance of being out (or not) was depressing because there was lots of evidence of concealing sexuality and lying and because clearly there is a huge amount of the ‘bleached professional’ going on. Where barristers are ‘out’ they are often out in relation to their partners only – so they build their professional gay identity around having a same sex partner rather than on being gay – playing the ‘good gay’ game and performing heteronormativity albeit within a same sex relationship.
The second paper was by Ben Waters (Canterbury Christ Church) on ADR and Civil Justice. I also enjoyed this paper although it’s not really my thing and I was still reflecting on the previous one so drifted in and out.
Anyway it was a fabulous start to the conference. Next I was going to hear more legal education/legal profession stuff and listen to Nigel Duncan (City) on teaching legal ethics but over coffee I realised that I was really flagging. I decided to check into the accommodation and have a little power nap so that’s what I did. Then I headed back to the publisher exhibition area and spent a lovely half hour looking at books (sooooooooo many books, so little time to read….) and then people started filtering in from the sessions for the drinks reception. At the reception I met up with Richard C and we spent the evening talking about well being and anxiety in the legal academy and it was lovely. I left dinner when Richard did and then I went to bed early and fell asleep almost immediately. A good day and a sensible one! I have a blog post started over a year ago on conference self care and I think maybe now is a good time to look at that draft and finish it. I’ll see if I get to it today.
My Conversations 