Legal education in Britain is on the verge of profound changes. This essay sets out to explore the intellectual and political context of the reform of legal education and of the issues which a project of radical reform needs to confront and resolve. 1
 
All is not well in legal education. In the past pressure for reform has come mainly from legal academics, but today it is the legal profession which is currently initiating the process. This development poses an interesting challenge to the critical legal community. For, while much of the stimulation of critical legal thought came from dissatisfaction with legal education, the critical camp has never had a very well formed strategy for legal education and has principally concentrated on grounding legal education in a sound theoretical framework. This theoretical focus has tended to ignore the more practical implications of the inescapable vocational aspirations of the great majority of law students. The challenge facing critical legal studies is to confront the difficult problems that need to be tackled in striving for some integration of theory and practice within legal education.
 
I will explore a number of current alternatives to expository legal education. Important though these have been in stimulating discussion and experimentation, I shall argue that, in their different ways, they are only partial solutions. My central argument is that it is both possible and desirable to go beyond these pragmatic or partial critiques and that a model of critical legal education offers such an alternative.

The Dissatisfaction with Expository Legal Education

There is a widespread dissatisfaction with the expository tradition and the inordinate amount of time that we require our students to spend 'learning the law' in a context in which there is an apparently unending expansion of rules of substantive law. The volume of learning is such as to inhibit the possibility of students being able to stand back and consider even the general course of development of legal doctrine, let alone to grapple with questions about the relations between doctrine and policy, between principles and rules, and the relationship between law and the political, economic and social development of contemporary society.
 
The dissatisfaction also stems from the tension in the relationship between the academic and vocational/professional dimensions of legal education. The goal of teaching students to think like lawyers becomes less than satisfactory when we admit that neither academics nor practitioners have any very satisfactory view of just what these skills amount to. 'Thinking like lawyers' was a conceivable educational objective when the ideal model was that of mooting as a preparation for a career as an advocate. But this model embodies only a small part of what only a few graduates will end up doing. Once we recognise that lawyering is probably more about interviewing skills, negotiating strategies, financial and office management, etc., then the orthodox model is less and less satisfactory.

Partial Critiques of Expository Orthodoxy

The post-war development of legal education has witnessed a number of 'partial critiques' of the expository tradition. I describe them as partial because, while their inspiration is dissatisfaction with the existing state of legal education, they all, to a greater or lesser extent, accept or work within the parameters laid down by the expository tradition. The topography of contemporary legal education consists of a substratum of the expository tradition overlaid with a variety of more recent features that are incorporated in a wide variety of forms, hence the increasingly pluralistic course structures and curriculums. The main partial critiques are as follows.

(a) Legal Methods

The focus on legal methods is to provide a general framework which can underpin substantive law teaching. It has been strongly oriented to the acquisition of student skills in the handling of legal materials. Its most immediate impact has been to seek to replace the traditional English Legal System course with its strongly institutional focus and very formalistic treatment of precedent and statutory interpretation. The most important exemplification of this alternative 'methods' model has been provided by Twining & Miers (1982).
 
The emphasis on legal method is compatible with a range of intellectual perspectives on legal education. The strong version of the expository approach, doctrinalism, is very sympathetic to foundational studies in legal reasoning, but possibly less at ease with a more radical strand within the method approach which permits the identification of a variety of styles of legal reasoning. There is wide support for a focus on manipulative skills in handling legal materials, but the focus remains fairly traditional in its view of what legal materials are the appellate judgement and the statute still retain pride of place.

(b) Expansion of the Syllabus

The typical undergraduate curriculum has expanded significantly over the past decades. In part this was a response to a real increase in the volume of law (for example, growth of administrative law, consumer law, etc.). In part it is a reflex of changing patterns of legal practice (for example, the rise of family law as matrimonial issues grew in importance for practice). This expansion of subjects in the law curriculum has been a counter-balance to the dominance of rich man's law in the traditional curriculum, and is manifest in the rise of labour, welfare and housing law.
 
Yet these new subjects have replicated the concerns and preoccupations of the expository tradition with the emphasis upon syllabus coverage and contemporaneity of treatment of case and statute law. The paradox is that in such subject areas, because of their regulatory character, the volume of substantive material leads to the treatment being even drier than that accorded to more traditional subjects.

(c) Sociolegal Trend

From the mid-1960s onwards, there was a noticeable growth of sociolegal material into most but by no means all law degrees. The general form of these developments was to add, usually as options, subjects variously labelled as Sociology of Law, Law and Society etc. The aim was to focus on law in action and to criticise the expository approach for ignoring both the constituting influences on the form and content of law, and the impact or consequences of law. Such courses usually espoused an input-output model. The input of social, political and economic causation was manifested in the popularity of emergence studies of statute law. The output focused upon an action model of law conceived as a process with a number of key decision stages. The other feature of the trend was its introduction of theories normally excluded from the official corpus of jurisprudence. Max Weber and Karl Marx began appearing in reading lists for the first time.2
 
The significance of the sociolegal trend has been its explicit challenge to the appropriate boundaries of legal studies. Its limitations have stemmed from its self-marginalisation within the comfortable environment of the specialist option. This location has provided an outlet for some law teachers and students. But the result has been that the main structure and content of legal education remained unchanged. This was significantly the consequence of sociolegal studies largely ignoring the domain of legal doctrine; the legal sociologists concerned themselves with the wider social origins and consequences of law, while the field of doctrine itself was left unexamined and safely within the expository tradition.

(d) Law in Context

The most distinctive impact upon the approach to the teaching of substantive law has come from a trend epitomised by the Law in Context series published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Its significance is that, unlike the sociolegal trend, it did not abandon the arena of legal doctrine. Indeed, its primary expression has been in the production of alternative texts in many, but still not all, substantive law fields.
 
The law-in-context trend, with its focus on the production of texts, has never had any very clearly formulated intellectual agenda about what constituted the context nor how that context was to be related to the treatment of substantive law. In its weakest version the context consists of nothing more than a descriptive account of the background, sketched in broad economic, social and political terms, within which the substantive law exists; the main bulk of such a text then proceeds within an expository approach. A second variant uses a policy-oriented perspective: legal doctrine is seen as the bearer or embodiment of social policy. This position generates an evaluatory view in which substantive law is checked against these policy goals.
 
A preliminary assessment of contextualism needs to recognise its significance in challenging the expository tradition in its own arena of substantive law. It is this feature which attests to its real but generally unspoken critique of orthodox legal education. However, its lack of apparent attention to its own methodology has resulted in its impact being uneven and largely dependent upon the strength or weakness of particular texts.

(e) Clinical Legal Studies

The expository tradition, while purporting to provide an academic foundation for lawyering, remains inside the realm of the law library, immunised from real clients. The clinical legal studies movement seeks to take seriously the vocational aspirations of law students by providing 'real' experience. It seeks to highlight the issues and skills in the advice-litigation complex that do not feature in expository legal education. At its best the clinical approach facilitates the consideration of alternatives to litigation rather than assuming litigation to be the natural result of legal problems.
 
The clinical approach bears many of the same features that have influenced the expansion of the syllabus, namely, the concern for those areas of law which impact upon sections of the population with unmet legal needs. It is strongly influenced by the model of the law-centres movement and tries, more or less explicitly, to open up radical alternatives to conventional legal practice. This alternative practice is grounded In a political commitment to new clients who are not served, but on the contrary are adversely affected, by rich man's law; these  clients are potentially all those who are disadvantaged economically, politically or socially.
 
The clinical legal studies approach has encountered serious practical problems, not least a lack of cooperation from certain sections of the profession. But beyond these wider issues it has not resolved its relationship with expository lecture-room teaching. Without a more radical restructuring of the curriculum it is likely that clinical experience will remain at best an addition to, rather than an alternative to, the expository mainstream.

Critical Legal Education

In order to respond to the critique of the expository tradition and the limitations of the currently available partial critiques it is necessary to argue the case for a fundamental restructuring of legal education. I would term this project critical legal education. My proposals are self consciously maximalistic; they seek to present a coherent alternative to the existing model. I do not suggest that the old model can be scrapped and the alternative introduced fully formed. In practice the process of change will be one of reform rather than revolution, but if the reform process is to have any direction it is necessary to specify what its goals are. To this end I focus on these goals, considering the means of realising them only illustratively and in so far as is necessary to amplify and justify them.
 
My claim is that the goal of resolving the tension between academic and vocational objectives can best be realised by enhancing student understanding of legal phenomena. The intellectual goals can be summarised as follows.

(a) Critique

It should be based on the method of critique which takes seriously the founding assumptions of legalism (which are presumed in legal studies)but does not treat them as eternal verities. Although there is considerable room for discussion about the constituent assumptions of legalism, I would suggest (for the purpose of illustration) the following: a unitary 'legal system'; the formal separation of state and law; and the 'centrality of law'. The focus should be on the problematic nature of these notions and their relationship to the wider society.

(b) Theoretically Grounded Legal Education

Current legal education is a theoretical but is pervaded by a powerful implicit theory; for present purposes I suggest that it lies somewhere between Austinian imperative and the Hartian model of rules. An alternative framework would start from the position that law, as a
complex social phenomenon, should be approached from a number of different perspectives, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Critical legal education should not seek to prioritise any single theoretical perspective.
 
The obvious question arises: how to give adequate attention to theory in an already crowded curriculum? Some brief comments can be made about possible solutions. The separation of theory from substantive law, which is epitomised in the normal separation of jurisprudence from substantive law subjects, should be avoided. Each substantive law field should incorporate its own required theoretical framework. For example, one would envisage property law drawing significantly upon political philosophy (Locke, Macpherson, etc.) while family law would probably draw more heavily on the sociology of the family, demography, etc.
 
There will be controversy concerning the process of drawing on theoretical traditions with their own internal intellectual histories. But, handled sensitively, it should be possible to draw upon sociology, philosophy or economic theory without first offering general courses in these disciplines.
 
To give adequate space to locating substantive law within a theoretically articulated framework requires a much more selective approach. This means abandoning the goal of coverage which is exemplified in the scrutiny of core syllabuses by the professional bodies. The most important implication will, therefore, be the need to enter into dialogue with the professional bodies in order to move away from the coverage criterion to one which focuses upon the way in which courses provide an appropriate mix of intellectual foundation and legal skills.

(c) Historically Grounded Legal Education

The great disservice done by medievalist legal history is to have brought about the eradication of history in any form from the typical law curriculum. History must be seen as having a central place in the law curriculum, not as a self-contained strand, but integrated within the teaching of substantive law. This requires a major shift in what is understood by legal history; most immediately, a shift from medievalism to modern legal history. But it also requires a shift from the preoccupation with the internal development of legal doctrine towards a socioeconomic orientation.

(d) Legal Doctrine and Legal Skills

Critical legal education must be centrally concerned with legal doctrine. It should not commit the errors of most sociolegal studies (indicated above), and the selective approach to syllabus planning should facilitate a much stronger skills orientation to original legal materials (which the current expansion of syllabuses does not). Such an orientation will not be without its problems. The tendency should not be to assume a model of a single set of lawyering skills (associated with the assumption of a single form of legal reasoning) but to expand the range of materials handled by students, beyond statutes and law reports, and to introduce them to the variety of forms of legal reasoning (for example, the interaction between reasoning from analogy, by deduction, from policy, principle or moralism etc.).

(e) Beyond the Little Boxes

The expansion of the typical law curriculum produces a highly fragmented student experience of encounters with compartmentalised bodies of rules, unified by some, usually unspecified, process and Presented as constituents of an integrated totality, the Law.
 
The critical legal approach must question this legal monism, the Law, and develop the curriculum so as not to imply a neat and taken-for-granted natural classification of sub-disciplines, This can be tackled at one level by an emphasis upon the cross-cutting and conflicting classificatory schemes (public/private, civil/criminal, etc.). But beyond this the aim should be to design syllabuses that consciously disrupt orthodox boundaries. Thus, for example, the public regulatory character of much private law can be accentuated, Additionally, foundation courses can be designed which emphasise the regulatory character of private/facilitative law.

Conclusion

In my view such a critical legal education would better serve the vocational aspirations of law students by providing them with more relevant skills within an intellectual framework which emphasises the contingent character of legal practices and processes, and highlights their changing relations with other mechanisms of social ordering and regulation. By carefully restricting the sheer weight of the contemporary curriculum it would offer, not only the scope for more selfconscious intellectual development, but also an emphasis on methods which will produce students better able to handle in a self-assured and critical fashion the widening range of occupational openings available to them .
 
The critical perspective should not seek to impose an alternative model curriculum with the same high degree of uniformity of the current model. Any attempt to embody the aims outlined above would inevitably lead to a much more varied array of law degrees. Such diversity would be a considerable strength, favouring different degrees of specialisation in both teaching and research, and offering a more attractive choice to Intending students. A more pluralistic array of law degrees would require a new and more mature relationship between the professional bodies and the academic institutions.
 
The current dissatisfaction with the condition of legal education can be turned into a period of creative development. Already some of the self-imposed bonds of the orthodox curriculum have been removed and a greater range of experimentation can be observed across a range of institutions. This essay has argued that these possibilities can be further extended and developed, not to produce a new orthodoxy, but to promote legal studies in a richer diversity that will enhance not only undergraduate courses but also scholarship and research.

Notes

1. This paper builds on and in important respects departs from an earlier paper (Hunt, 1986).

2. For evidence of the radical shifts that have taken place in the content of legal theory and jurisprudence syllabuses see Barnett & Yach (1985).