Serendipity again
University College Dar es Salaam was mentored and helped by the Inter University Council based in London with one representative on the College Council. In August or September 1964, Professor Francis Newark, Dean of the Faculty of Law at the Queen’s University Belfast, came to Dar for a Council meeting. As there was no hotel near the new campus, he was billeted chez Twinings. Our guest bedroom was my study. I thought Newark was a dry old stick, but we got on well enough. Apparently, he was impressed by my Jurisprudence library – which was quite good. A few weeks later, completely out of the blue, I received a letter from Newark inviting me to apply for the Chair of Jurisprudence at Queen’s. Books do furnish a room!
I was taken completely by surprise. I had begun to think of moving on and was contemplating a research post at Lagos or a lectureship at Southampton whose Dean of Law, Arthur Philips, had worked in East Africa. With some hesitation – was this serious? Could I cope? Where exactly was Belfast? – I sent in an application to Queen’s. Before flying to the UK for an interview, I learned that the University of Leicester had just advertised the founding Chair for a new School of Law. Having nothing to lose, I contacted the Registrar of Leicester asking for an appointment with the Vice-Chancellor. He said that the process had hardly begun as the closing date had not passed. His tone suggested that he thought that it was rather uppity for a youth from Dar es Salaam to make such an enquiry. I went to Queen’s, was interviewed, and was offered the post on the spot. I hesitated and said I would need a week to decide as I had another possibility to explore. I then phoned the Registrar at Leicester and told him that I had been offered a Chair at Queen’s. Reluctantly he arranged an interview with the Vice-Chancellor. I do not remember the details of that meeting very well. I may have lectured him on how to set up a law school – and when I told him that the amount they had budgeted for the law library was less than 25 per cent of what we had already spent on our library at Dar, he began to listen. The timing of the appointment process was wrong, so I accepted the post at Queen’s. I hope that this helped the new Dean at Leicester.
I was told only a little about the background to the vacancy at Queen’s on my first visit. The post had been vacant for some time since the resignation of Professor James Louis Montrose, who had been Dean since 1934. He was well-known as an advocate for liberal legal education and for numerous public activities in both Northern Ireland and England. He shared similar views on Jurisprudence and legal scholarship with his close friend, Julius Stone, and I found his intellectual legacy very helpful because it included the most enlightened LLB curriculum in the British Isles.
Nearly thirty years of Deanship, interrupted by war service in the RAF, ended in tragedy.1 There was a formal annual election for the Dean. This had been uncontested since 1938, but in the early 1960s after some acrimonious in-fighting, Montrose was deposed by a vote of 4–3 by younger faculty members. He stood again and lost. He then took off on a series of visiting appointments, including Singapore (where he was Dean in 1965–6), Australia, and finally New Zealand, where he died of cancer in October 1966.
I learned later that ‘the Montrose Affair’ had been simmering for some time, but ironically came to a head when Montrose ‘dictatorially’ reinstated a student who had been rusticated by an Orwellian ‘Progress Committee’ for an off-campus incident. Montrose considered this to be none of the business of this committee. After a bitter fight that lasted over a year, Montrose resigned from Queen’s. Newark reluctantly took over. The bitterness lingered on – so much so that a small Faculty had been divided into three Departments to keep the factions apart. I only learned when I arrived in Belfast for interview that the Association of University Teachers (AUT), of which Montrose had been a leading member, had urged a boycott of Queen’s because of the ‘Montrose Affair’, but the rights and wrongs of this were rather obscure. I barely knew what the AUT was and I sympathised with Montrose. I did not withdraw and was offered the job. So I found myself not only Professor of Jurisprudence (which I felt was grand) but also Head of the Department of Law and Jurisprudence. Theory sceptics used to misquote Ulpian as having said that Jurisprudence was the knowledge of all things human and divine – except law.2 So this was a comprehensive remit, except that there were also separate Departments of Private and Public Law.
Context
The background to the next seven years needs some explaining. Ireland in general, and Northern Ireland in particular, are complex and opaque societies. Having married a Dublin Protestant, I had already spent time in the South. Penelope had been brought up never to discuss either religion or politics on social occasions. She had barely crossed the border and was quite apprehensive about living there. As a Protestant she had expected to be quite at home but was disappointed. I had been intrigued and bewildered by Dublin culture, but that proved to be nothing compared to our bafflement in Belfast.
We arrived in Belfast in January 1966 having effectively been overseas for nearly ten years. We did not have TV in Dar and Khartoum and I had seen only a couple of the blockbuster movies and none of the avant garde ones for a decade. Mainly through the BBC World Service I had learned about the Cuban Missile crisis, the Kennedy Assassination, the Beatles, James Bond, Swinging London, drugs and Mary Quant. Ian Smith’s Rhodesian UDI (11 November 1965) happened just before we arrived in Belfast and Claire Palley, the historian of Southern Rhodesian politics and constitutions, joined Queen’s at almost the same time as I did.3 Visits to the United States in 1963, 1964 and 1965 had put me in touch with American politics and culture, but as regards the UK and Europe I had a lot of catching up to do. From 1966 I vicariously experienced many other events beyond Belfast: for example, a majority Labour government in Westminster, responses to UDI, England winning the World Cup, the Aberfan disaster, the Nigerian Civil War, the Thalidomide Affair, de Gaulle’s 1967 blocking of UK from the European Community, the Moon Landing and the Magic Roundabout were among happenings that engaged my attention. I was in Chicago in April 1968 when Martin Luther King was assassinated, visited New Haven during student disorders and was in Belfast during the student unrest in ‘1968’, which really happened there in 1969.
Sectarian tensions were mounting in January 1966, but they were still fairly quiet. The main noise came from the Rev. Ian Paisley, whose ranting sermons and antics (including throwing snowballs at the Taoiseach on a visit to Belfast in 1968) were increasing media attention. Soon after we arrived, Penelope and I, out of curiosity, went to listen to one of his sermons. We were eyed with suspicion, but allowed in, and were quite shocked at what we heard. Our reaction to him was rather like British liberal reactions to Donald Trump fifty years later.
In Belfast we mostly lived in an expatriate cocoon. The Faculty was quite hierarchical and social contact with students was more limited than I was used to. The University was quite cosmopolitan4 and its social life for us was largely expatriate, because most of the local middle class were very family-oriented and hardly ever entertained outsiders at home. When the Troubles became more serious we were even more isolated and our children complained that they were under house arrest. We had little contact with locals other than colleagues and the legal establishment, except that, after a year spent reading Social Studies at Queen’s, Penelope did social work for two years on both sides of ‘the Peace Line’.5 We explored the beautiful countryside and the ‘safe’ bits of Belfast as tourists rather than residents. Penelope had relatives in Dublin, a city I came to love. For a time, we borrowed a small isolated cottage in the Mournes, with water, but not electricity or adequate heating. We liked it, but the children and the cats did not.
From this plethora of events and concerns I shall focus briefly on two which are particularly relevant as background to this period: sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland and the changing legal scene in England. I was an appalled spectator of the former, but with a ringside seat; I was actively, if peripherally, involved in the latter.
The Troubles
We were truly outsiders except in one important respect: we had intimate vicarious access to the sectarian conflicts, mainly through three remarkable people. The first was John Graham, Penelope’s first cousin, with whom we drank and supped a lot. He was correspondent for the Financial Times. From 1971 this included at the Europa, ‘the most bombed hotel in Europe’ where most of the press corps stayed. The second was Tom Hadden, son of a local doctor, who was in my department from 1969. He played a leading role in trying to bridge the sectarian divide, not least through founding and editing Fortnight, an influential non-sectarian political and cultural magazine of which Gerry Adams reportedly said: ‘A month without Fortnight would be twice as long.’6 The third was Kevin Boyle, a young lecturer in Criminal Law and Criminology with whom we became very close. He was a leading member of the civil rights movement, including being spokesman and informal legal adviser for the People’s Democracy until he was ousted for being too moderate. Kevin remained a close friend until his death in 2010. I had overlapping academic interests with both Tom and Kevin in relation to socio-legal studies. I learned much from both about law in action in Northern Ireland, fact-based policy and, most important, a nuanced view of the intricate relations between law and politics. Simplistic mantras like ‘All law is politics’ just won’t do.
I wrote an account of my relations with these three remarkable people, but I have reluctantly dropped it as being largely irrelevant to this memoir. Suffice to say that fed by these insiders I became obsessed by the conflict and local politics but, unlike some colleagues, I did not engage with them academically until towards the end of my stay. I pored over several newspapers, read Fortnight assiduously, and listened three or four times a day to the local radio, quite often hearing Kevin being interviewed. In Belfast I felt that each day the roofs were being lifted off particular houses in different parts of the city so that one could peek inside. This was in addition to my three involved informants, who were very close to the action. At such close quarters, as in Kenya, it was often difficult to distinguish politics from gossip. Although I had the access and the opportunity, I kept my distance academically, unlike my fellow expatriate colleagues, Harry Calvert and Claire Palley. Indeed, I did not really try to analyse Northern Ireland politics as a scholar – I felt that most of the participants, other than my friends, were deluded, dogmatic and crazy. I thought that the Protestant leaders in particular were votaries at the shrine of bigotry, chauvinism and intolerance. This was tribalism rather than nationalism as I understood it.
How all this affected my academic work is hard to say. The situation was a large part of the backdrop and my ‘problem of belief’ surfaced again (Chapters 2, 3 and 9). To me the leaders on both sides seemed irrational and unpersuadable. Penelope, usually apolitical, a Dublin Protestant, became quite a strong Nationalist sympathiser; our son Peter, born in Hatch St. Dublin, more mildly so (he still backs Ireland against England in the Six Nations competition). Karen and I could not identify with either side and felt alienated. Locals on both sides complained that we English did not understand them. They were right. I was quite well-informed, but mystified. I have never lived anywhere that I felt more of an expatriate than in Belfast.
Sectarian conflict, the resurgence of violence, the political and other responses, the role of Queen’s in this situation, troops on the street, were in both the background and the foreground until we left in March 1972. Bloody Sunday occurred in January of that year, but its full significance took time to surface. Even in extreme conflict situations, such as this, life goes on: shopping, getting to work, children going to school, teaching and research and socialising at the University still happened. They were only occasionally interrupted by the Troubles. One became street-wise, comforted by maxims and myths such as Republicans get up late, so shop early; this cinema, that theatre, these pubs are not targets; if electricity is attacked that’s the IRA; if water, the Loyalists and so on.
Outwardly we remained calm. I only realised my underlying tension on visits to England: at Woolworths in Leamington, I saw an unattended package and realised that no one else was paying it any attention – should I raise the alarm? One evening on the underground in London I felt the handle of my overnight case vibrating. I checked that it was mine, got off at the next station, put the case behind one pillar, hid behind another, crept forward and peeked – it was indeed vibrating. I should have emptied the station; instead, violating all instructions, I opened the case. My electric razor had turned itself on. I was bathed in sweat and ashamed. But many people love living in Ulster. In 1972 when students heard that I was leaving, a group of six or so came and grilled me: did I fish? No. Did I shoot? No. Did I play golf? No. Did I think that the countryside was beautiful? Yes. Did I walk? Yes. Why was I leaving? I had been offered an exciting job at Warwick. ‘Ah. Then, it’s not these pesky local bothers is it?’ No. This was partly true, for the Warwick job was very much a positive; but Belfast was no place to bring up children, especially the schools segregated by religion, class and gender. We had reluctantly sent them to boarding school in England, where Peter suffered nightmares about us being blown up. Yet over half of Queen’s law graduates opted to stay in Northern Ireland.
Life went on and much of my work was remote from the local ‘bothers’, but I did become intellectually and emotionally engaged with them. However, I approached these at a quite general level of principle, without much explicit reference to the specifics of Northern Ireland and this I felt was required in teaching. I remained fascinated, but uninvolved until, near the end of my stay, I did publicly engage with issues about emergency powers and ‘severe interrogation’ and this sharpened my views on justice, human rights and utilitarianism (Chapter 9).
Legal change in England
I did, however, become involved quite actively in the changing legal scene in England, especially in relation to law reform and legal education and training. This was a period of intellectual awakening and reform in legal circles, well caught by Gerald Gardiner and Andrew Martin’s Law Reform Now (1963). That preceded Gardiner’s period as a reforming Lord Chancellor (1964–70). During that period Law Commissions were established, Parliamentary Ombudsman Services were instituted, and the Ormrod Committee on Legal Education in England and Wales began work. Some academic lawyers, notably Michael Zander and Robert Stevens, broke with tradition by being openly critical of the legal establishment and its entrenched conservatism.7 This was also the period of university expansion, greater focus on the social sciences, the creation of a first wave of new (‘plate-glass’) universities, and the Open University; the monopoly of law publishing by Sweet and Maxwell and Butterworth began to be eroded, and there was a general sense of intellectual excitement. We felt we were in the Yellow Submarine. With a few colleagues, I became involved with several of these developments both in Northern Ireland and in England. The Law in Context series, submissions to the English Law Commission and the Ormrod Committee, the Young Members’ Group of the Society of Public Teachers of Law, the Statute Law Society and the Armitage Committee on Legal Education in Northern Ireland were the most salient ones. As we shall see, from quite early on I had long discussions with Geoffrey Wilson who became the Founding Professor of Law at the new University of Warwick (Chapter 12). In Belfast we had especially close relations with the First Parliamentary Draftsman at Stormont, Bill Leitch, who had outstanding skills and interesting ideas related to drafting and making legislation. A younger colleague, Abdul Paliwala, was seconded to his office half-time and became the first and probably the only Zanzibari ever to work in the Northern Ireland Civil Service. I was a founding member of the Statute Law Society and participated in two of its reports. I also had close contact with Sir Leslie (later Lord) Scarman the first Chairman of the Law Commission and law reform in both England and Northern Ireland was high on our agendas. Later I was a member of the Armitage Committee on Legal Education in Northern Ireland, which learned to avoid some of the mistakes made in the Ormrod process.8 In all of these activities my African background and my experience of American Law Schools proved to be highly relevant. It was an exciting time to be an academic lawyer.
Teaching Jurisprudence at Queen’s
Life goes on. Despite the Troubles and the ferment, most of my teaching and writing during this period had little to do with local issues. Indeed, under the Irish Universities Act 1908, I was required not to do or say anything ‘calculated to offend the religious susceptibilities of [my] students’.9 Hardly compatible with teaching Jurisprudence. The average ratio of each class was roughly 50+ per cent Protestant, 40+ per cent Catholic, the rest not local. I managed to navigate these difficulties, partly by some pedagogical tricks, but mainly by indirection. The assumptions I challenged were not obviously local. I sometimes got the whole class to hiss or clap together.
My main writing project was the book on Karl Llewellyn, which I submitted to Weidenfeld’s in 1971 (Chapter 7); the second one, on interpretation of social and legal rules, was not finished until after I left Queen’s; this was based on our first-year teaching and was similarly not closely related to local matters (Chapter 11). My relatively thin list of publications mainly dealt with Legal Education and Jurisprudence. The former were very much directed to the English debates, the latter were only subliminally influenced by my Northern Ireland experience.
Montrose’s main legacy was a large number of loyal former students and a very progressive undergraduate Law degree: an innovative and enlightened curriculum for a four-year Honours Degree (few opted for the three-year Pass Degree), subjects that were ahead of their time such as Labour Law and Social Legislation, a requirement that every student had to study at least one or two subjects in depth (sadly lacking in the current English scene) and three compulsory theory subjects, labelled Juristic Technique, Legal Philosophy (half-course) and Advanced Jurisprudence. Rarely has a Professor of Jurisprudence had such an opportunity. I kept the labels and tried to continue the spirit of Montrose.
Montrose had left before his curriculum was implemented, so I had a virtually free hand in filling in the details. Between 1966 and 1972, I had several very able younger colleagues to help me, including Katherine O’Donovan, Nial Osborough, David Miers, Abdul Paliwala, Tom Hadden, Peter Fitzpatrick, all now well-known as academic lawyers, and Reg Weir (later a Lord Justice of Appeal in Northern Ireland). They were all near the start of their careers and I was the Professor, which meant boss in those days. I gave them each some space, but I was clearly the leader of a team.
It was at Queen’s that I found my feet and my voice, without publishing much during that period. I incubated my ideas, largely through teaching, so it is worth concentrating on that. I designed Juristic Technique as a course on sources of law that combined theoretical ideas with the development of intellectual skills, especially skills of reading and reasoning about cases and statutes. Eventually this became a book, How to Do Things with Rules with David Miers, which had matured over ten years of teaching before it was first published in 1976 (Chapter 10).
The half course on Legal Philosophy was devoted to intensive study of a selection of set texts. The list was reviewed every year and colleagues could offer texts of their choice. One year I used to visit a Nationalist student who was interned without trial in Crumlin Road Gaol but allowed to continue his degree studies. On one visit I brought with me two of the set texts, Mill’s On Liberty, and Engels’s The Holy Family. Engels passed without question; but Mill was confiscated and only allowed in after a formal protest. In teaching this course I combined Collingwood’s method of studying philosophical texts with Llewellyn’s rationale for a course on Jurisprudence: the purpose is for each student to integrate their general beliefs about religion, politics, morals and society with their beliefs about law.10 Reading was a personal as well as a disciplined matter: first set the text in context (historical) – especially the author’s concerns: what was biting him? (At that time there were no women jurists recognised as canonical). Stage 2: analytical – what questions did the text address? Were they appropriate expressions of the concerns? Were they open to criticism as questions? What answers did the author suggest? What justification did he advance for his conclusions? In short, a neo-Collingwoodian reconstruction of the text. Stage 3: applied – so what? What are the implications and applications of this text – in relation to concrete issues or other thinkers? Stage 4: critique – do I agree with the questions? Do I agree with the answers? Do I agree with the reasons? A Llewellynesque exercise in self-definition of which, I think, Collingwood might have approved.11
My examination questions for this course tended to be personal: are you a utilitarian? Do you have any natural rights? Are you a positivist? The students well understood that I would not take Yes or No for an answer and that they had to argue for a position, after clarifying the meaning of the question. I continued to use this approach in my Jurisprudence teaching. Later, I broadened it to include how to read any kind of materials of law study, distilled in The Reading Law Cookbook, which consists almost entirely of questions.12
The first two courses (first and second year) were coherent and relatively easy to teach. I do not remember the students complaining that they were compulsory or ‘too theoretical’, perhaps because we gave them some freedom of choice within each of them. However, there was some student resistance to the final course called Advanced Jurisprudence (fourth year), which was also compulsory. Some of the resistance was understandably unintellectual or practitioner-oriented, but some was anti-intellectual, which was disappointing given the liberal ethos and traditions of Queen’s. We tried a number of devices to counter this: at some sacrifice of coherence we gave students freedom to choose from a wide range of questions, sometimes four out of sixteen.13 In mid-sessional exams I used to administer a ‘Russian-style test’ – at the start of the course I would hand out a two-page document with about thirty questions on them, telling them that at the mid-sessional we would draw ten questions out of a hat of which they would have to answer three; they enjoyed the hat, probably ran books on the odds of getting any particular questions (how many could they risk not preparing for?), and were led into focusing on significant questions.
Several colleagues contributed to the (Advanced) Jurisprudence course; I focused mainly on Bentham, American Legal Realism (my version of ‘realism’ came later) and empirical legal studies and the students were exposed to a range of other points of view. I used a similar approach when I moved to Warwick and UCL, but in both places at undergraduate level we were constrained by having only one compulsory course on Jurisprudence/Legal Theory in a three-year LLB.14 I tried to cope with this by introducing sub-options and a compulsory essay for which each student could propose the topic which had to be approved. But I missed the space I had had at Queen’s, so at UCL I concentrated more on postgraduate teaching.
My duties at Queen’s were quite demanding in term-time, and I still kept up my African connections during vacations, mainly by external examining – extending my range to West Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland. As Head of Department I had some administrative duties and, by virtue of that, was on several University bodies. However, largely thanks to the kindness of my two senior colleagues, Lee Sheridan and Francis Newark, I only had to serve as Dean for a bit more than a year. During my time at Queen’s I continued to worry about justifying my appointment as Professor with a thin publishing record. I had been appointed on promise and I struggled to finish my book on Llewellyn (KLRM). So I was grateful for that relief.
Scholarship
At Queen’s almost all of my teaching, thinking and writing fell within the sphere of Jurisprudence broadly conceived, but towards the applied end. Apart from KLRM my writing dealt with quite general ideas, but in a rather fragmented way: my inaugural lecture, ‘Pericles and the Plumber’, drew largely on American ideas to ground an argument about rethinking legal education in the UK;15 in 1966 I tried to develop a rationale for the Law in Context series, partly through a critique of orthodox legal textbooks and ‘the Expository Tradition’;16 ‘Ernie and the Centipede’ explored the idea of ‘fact-based classification’ of legal fields explicitly in relation to the newly formed English Law Commission’s long-term strategy – how might ‘the statute book’ be organised in future?17 The course on Juristic Technique and its child, How to Do Things with Rules, focused on the interpretation of social and legal rules and the continuities between them in a deliberately concrete way, exploring the tensions between generality and particularity largely through analysis of case studies drawn from several areas of social life in addition to law; much of my Jurisprudence teaching involved close reading of selected texts, not all of them ‘philosophical’. In all of these activities I was theorising, but in a decidedly particularistic way. It was in contemplation of my move to Warwick that I first thought in a sustained way about Jurisprudence as a subject in order to confront the relationship between my professed subject and an institution dedicated programmatically to ‘broadening the study of law from within’.18 My underlying concern was what could a legal theorist offer to the Warwick enterprise? This found expression in my inaugural lecture at Warwick, ‘Some Jobs for Jurisprudence’ which was delivered late in 1973 and published as a more general statement about the national scene in academic law in 1974.19 This was my first attempt to think about my conception of Jurisprudence, the place of Legal Philosophy within it, and theorising as an activity and its potential contribution to the health of Law as a discipline, anticipating the views set out above in Chapter 1. None of these activities fall clearly within ‘Legal Philosophy’, but they were all exercises in theorising. Accordingly, it is clear that most of my academic activities during the Queen’s period were jurisprudential, whereas at Warwick I was mainly concerned with implementing the enterprise of broadening the study of law from within.
My two main projects during the next thirty years or so related to theorising first about Evidence and then, from the mid-1990s, about Globalisation and Law. Both can be broadly interpreted as middle-order theorising. During that period, which can be said to have begun with the appointment of Ronald Dworkin as Hart’s successor in 1969, Jurisprudence generally became more abstract, morphing into self-styled ‘Legal Philosophy’, which grew away from my central concerns and, in my view, from the discipline of Law. Jurisprudence became a subject apart. This tendency began in Oxford and diffused quite widely through what might be termed a generation of Hart’s intellectual grandchildren, most of whom were supervised or influenced by his three leading successors, Dworkin, Finnis and Raz. While respecting some of the work of individuals, I do not think that this development was generally good for the health of Law as a discipline. I kept in touch with these developments but did not participate much in what became the mainstream.20
Towards the end of my time at Queen’s I became associated with the Bentham Project at UCL and unearthed two manuscripts on torture and prepared them for publication. About the same time, and not coincidentally, we formed a staff-student working party to contribute to public debates on emergency powers, interrogation techniques and associated matters. The aim was to try to analyse the issues with the ‘relative detachment’ appropriate to a university. These two activities are discussed in detail in the next chapter. Chapters 9–11 deal with theoretical ideas that were significantly developed during my time at Queen’s: Normative Jurisprudence (Chapter 9), standpoint, questioning and legal reasoning (Chapter 10) and social and legal rules, how they are related and problems of interpreting and handling them (Chapter 11). The story of my move to Warwick is postponed until Chapter 12.
Four-year degrees
Apart from developing my own ideas without too much pressure to publish, perhaps the main lesson for me came from experiencing a four-year undergraduate degree in Law. At Warwick and UCL the first degree in Law (other than for mixed degrees) was only three years and I realised that many of their main constraints were due to the course being too short and pressures to overload the curriculum. Thereafter I was convinced that the Achilles Heel of legal education and training in England (but not Scotland and Northern Ireland) was the three-year undergraduate degree for 18-year-olds. For several years I chaired a working party on Four-Year Degrees in Law. At both Warwick and UCL I successfully pressed for a provision that allowed undergraduates to opt to take four years over the LLB, but this was a failure because very few availed themselves of the opportunity. However, most mixed degrees (e.g. Law and Sociology at Warwick) were for four years. In those days mandatory grants were available for four-year degrees, including means-tested maintenance grants, so the main obstacle was not at first economic. Today student debt exerts heavy pressures in the reverse direction. Queen’s held on to the four-year degree until 1991–2 and Scottish universities, to their great credit, have retained four years for Honours. In England this was a cause that for the medium term seemed unwinnable, so I focused much of my energies at UCL on postgraduate legal education. But I remain convinced that so long as undergraduate legal education for 18-year-olds remains one of the shortest in the world, most of the problems and conflicts will continue unresolved: the creeping core, the overloaded curriculum, the struggle between balancing knowledge and skills, pressured career choices and the immaturity – intellectually, practically and professionally – of 21-year-old law graduates. Recent changes in university finance and the regulation of legal services have made matters even worse. We are now at the start of a period of serious rethinking about the economic base of tertiary education. There is little hope for undergraduate legal education in UK until four-year degrees become the norm.
