Legal Village

Education for the curious, please

Posted 25/10/2007 by Mike Semple Piggot

Thinking about legal education I’m often reminded of Albert Einstein’s comment that it is a miracle that “curiosity survives formal education”.

One of the concerns I have had over the last 25 years of teaching law is the danger that students focus too narrowly in their reading and rely too much on the notes gained from lectures and other secondary source materials. Textbooks, recorded lectures and other revision aids can only do so much and should be used to lay a foundation upon which the student may build by reading law reports, articles and other materials in a good library.

The difficulty today - as it has been for some years - is the need for students to secure high grades at both the academic stage and the vocational stage if they are to have any hope of getting a training contract or a pupillage. The drive to secure a First or 2.1 can depress the urge to read widely because the student focuses only on the exam and not the wider education provided on a good law degree programme.

In recent weeks Consilio has been involved in promoting debate on the new degree-awarding powers enjoyed by The College of Law and BPP. Charon QC, a fictitious lawyer, alter ego and resident blogger on Consilio, has done podcasts with the leading lights at the three main vocational Schools: Nigel Savage at The College of Law, Peter Crisp at BPP and Giles Proctor at Nottingham Kaplan.

The new powers enjoyed by BPP and The College of Law have given rise to heated debate and criticism - most notably, Ian Grigg-Spall, academic chair of Kent Law School who, in a letter to The Times Higher Education Supplement, was moved to ask “if such competition (by BPP with public sector university degree providers) will be healthy for education when BPP has announced that one of its first degrees will be an LLB, which it will offer to all students who complete the one-year graduate diploma in law”.

Grigg-Spall questions the academic integrity of such a programme and asserts that while this may be “healthy for BPP profits” it may undermine the credibility of British legal education abroad.

It may well do, but I have a quite different concern. The GDL is already a demanding course. Students have to study seven core subjects. Crisp, in his podcast with me (or rather, my alter ego Charon) confirmed that students are required to read widely in the law reports and journals. One hopes that students are able to find the time to do so, for otherwise, as Einstein said, curiosity may not survive formal education and the student will miss out on the experience enjoyed by a degree student on a traditional three-year law programme; namely, time for wider reading, time for questioning, debate, discussion and analysis – skills which are crucial in later academic and professional life.

That said, I believe passion is also important. A perfect example of passion and enthusiasm for law came up this week. Iolis, a regular contributor on the Consilio discussion board, had found a film posted on YouTube involving abuse of powers by two police officers. Police officers told a film-maker, filming the police talking to a young lad from his own garden, to stop filming and  told him that filming the police was an offence. The film-maker knew his law, continued filming and told the officers that it was not an offence to film the police. They eventually backed down.

Police officers making laws up, misusing their authority, may well be in the minority, but it was good to see someone standing up for their rights in the face of authority incorrectly quoting the law – and even more pleasing to see that a contributor on the discussion board was able to remind us of the famous case of Entinck v Carrington [1765].

I think Einstein would have put these discussion board contributors, studying or continuing to study law, into the passionate and curious end of the legal education spectrum.

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