To achieve major changes in legal education and practice, critical students, academics and practitioners must, in our view, work closely together. Until recently, the critical legal studies movement had failed to pursue this objective. In the last few years, however, Critical Lawyers' Groups have successfully been formed in a number of polytechnic and university law departments. They have received wide support not only from students and academics but also from many practitioners. Our hope is that this handbook will contribute to the formation of many more of these groups.

Organising Critical Lawyers' Groups

In our experience student-run CLG's have shown the greatest energy and commitment and have been the most successful in drawing in academics and practitioners. In a way, therefore, this chapter is addressed principally to the new generation of law students whom we would like to encourage to establish CLGs in their own institutions. The following points may be helpful to students organising CLGs.
 
If possible you should establish your CLG as a student union society. This enables you to ask the Student Union for money to pay for speakers (normally a meal and travelling expenses), stationery, postage and telephone costs. You will need to draft a constitution. As a guide, the constitution of the CLG at the University of Kent reads:

The CLG is open to all students and staff with a critical approach towards law, legal education and practice. The CLG will seek: (a) To develop a theoretically grounded critique of orthodox legal studies; (b) To foster debate on the role and limits of law in a capitalist society and to consider the potentiality of a legal education and practice in the interests of the disadvantaged and oppressed; (c) To provide a discussion forum for organisations and campaigns concerned with struggles around law, legal education and practice;5 (d) To initiate and to support progressive struggles around law, legal education and practice; (e) To encourage and to initiate alternative forms of legal education and practice; (f) To these ends to invite speakers, engage in critical debate and undertake practical work; and (g) To affiliate to the National CLG and assist in its organisation and activities.

Local critical practitioners should be invited to attend meetings (see Chapter 5) and to sit on your committee. You should approach your law department for assistance. This is useful as it will encourage staff to become actively involved in the CLG. Student Union rules allow staff to be members of student societies but not to hold office. To launch the group you might, perhaps, hold an open meeting on legal education. The editors can supply speakers for this or you might ask contributors to visit you. Further regular open meetings should be organised. This last point is crucial for it is the basis for meeting and working with people from all over the country.

In recent years CLGs have welcomed a wide range of persons and many of these have become active supporters. They include Michael Mansfield QC, who has spoken on the Irish cases, the miners' strike, and Suspect Confessions'; Ed Rees (barrister) on the Tottenham Three and the Orgreave 'riot' trial; Tanoo Mylvaganam (barrister) on 'Racism and Sexism at the Bar'; Maggie Monteith, the Director of the Women's Legal Defence Fund; John Fitzpatrick (solicitor) on 'Law Centres and Critical Practice' and 'Imperialism, Palestine and the Gulf War'; Stephen Sedley QC on 'Judicial Review - A Weapon for Socialists?'; Rate Markus, the Secretary of the Law Centres Federation, on 'The Politics of Legal Aid'; Geoffrey Bindman (solicitor) on 'South Africa and the Rule of Legal Terror'; John Hendy QC on 'Anti-Union Laws - How They Work'; Tony Jennings (barrister) on 'The Abuse of Civil Liberties in Northern Ireland'; Andrew Puddefat, General Secretary of Liberty (formerly NCCL), on 'Rushdie - To Ban or Not to Ban'; Terry Munyard (barrister) on 'The Legal Oppression of Gays and Lesbians'; Mike Anderson (lecturer) on 'The Bhopal Litigation - How Lawyers Ensure Clients Don't Have To Pay'; Nick Blake (barrister) on 'Irish prisoners and British judges'; Tim Gopsill, editor of the Journalist, on 'Censorship and the Gulf War'; Paul Rawlinson (solicitor) on 'City Lawyers - Acting in Whose Interest?'; Sinn Fein on 'Legal and Illegal Repression in Northern Ireland'; Richard Schwartz (researcher) on'Human Rights and Palestine', and Bill Bowring, Chair of the PIaldane Society, on 'International Law and the Gulf War'.

Free Legal Advice Centres

At a number of educational institutions (for example, at Coventry and Kent) the CLG committees have established free legal advice centres on local housing estates. Not only do these provide much-needed assistance to local communities, they are also a very useful way of bringing together practitioners, academics and law students and of  encouraging co-operation, discussion and the development of a critical approach to law and legal practice. For students in particular the experience of the legal problems of the poor and disadvantaged has been a Powerful antidote to the orientation of many law courses as currently taught.
 
Readers may find useful some detail on the operation of one of the centres.
 
The Canterbury centre (known as Canterbury Community Aid -CCA) is responsible to the CLG executive committee and organised by a student coordinator. Its main objects are to establish a free legal advice and action centre and to consider the possibilities and practicalities of a legal education and legal practice relevant to the needs of the disadvantaged and poor. The centre operates every Monday evening from a local community social club on one of the council estates in Canterbury. It is staffed by a rota of volunteer solicitors and legal executives who work with a team of law students. The qualified legal adviser is there in a supervisory capacity, the students interview the clients, take notes, do any necessary legal research, write letters (although all letters are checked by a legal adviser before posting) and, where possible, represent clients before tribunals and courts as 'McKenzie friends'. Students have appeared in the magistrates', county and crown courts as well as before social security appeals and legal aid tribunals.
 
Richard Carroll, the student co-ordinator for 1990/91, indicates in his annual report that over 150 persons sought advice, principally in the following areas: Poll Tax, consumer problems, employment (including change of contract, underpayment, unfair dismissal, tribunal representation, temporary lay-offs and holiday entitlements), social security and housing problems (including notice to quit, eviction, rent, repairs and easements).

The centre has not only been involved in individual casework, but has also participated in a number of political campaigns, notably that against the Poll Tax, becoming one of the Kent Anti-Poll-Tax Union's legal advisers. The centre published leaflets on legal resistance to the Poll Tax and took part in many media presentations. In Poll Tax cases student advisers were initially allowed by magistrates' courts to represent persons as 'McKenzie friends'. However, the success of their efforts in raising procedural and substantive issues led the court to remove this 'right' and to refuse all further applications. This became the policy of magistrates across the country as they sought to process the huge number of Poll Tax resistors. The centre worked with the NCCL on a judicial review of one of the McKenzie refusals which was heard by the High Court in November 1990. The High Court declared that the McKenzie friend had never been a 'right', merely a privilege which might be allowed by magistrates using their 'discretionary 'powers. This flew in the face of authorities dating back 150 years and, for blatant political manipulation, must stand on a par with the courts' judgements during the miners' strike! Comment on this case and other breaches was published in the Legal Action Bulletin. The case is now on appeal.
 
A further development in 1990 was the establishment by CCA of links with the Women's Legal Defence Fund. A new Canterbury Employment Discrimination Clinic has been handling sex-discrimination cases since October 1991.
 
The centre has had many successes and students have gained a considerable amount of knowledge about, and insight into, the operation of the legal system. These insights have led to proposals for changes in the way that law is taught at Rent and in the content of specific law courses. The Kent law school now recognises work in the centre for degree assessment purposes. A new course on legal process will actively encourage students to participate in the centre.

The National CLG Committee

Since February 1989 there has been a National CLG Committee to co-ordinate the activities of the local CLGs. This committee organised the first CLG Annual Conference at Coventry Polytechnic in November 1990 under the title, 'What's Left in the Law?'. It also jointly published with the editors of the journal Law and Critique, an article on the concerns and objectives of CLGs (vol 1, spring 1990, pp. 121-6). Readers may be interested in some further details of both the conference and the article.
 
The conference was attended by over 150 law students, practitioners and academics, including a majority of the contributors to this handbook. The theme of the conference was the prospect for the legal left of developing a liberating legal education, campaigning for legal freedoms and humanising legal practice.
 
At the plenary session, Sol Picciotto (former Chair of the University of Warwick Law School) spoke about the past failures of left legal groups in education and how CLGs must become involved in issues that affect all students as well as seeking to overcome traditional 'black-letter' law teaching, now bolstered and distorted by private finance. Mike Mansfield QC surveyed the state attacks on fundamental freedoms since the mid-1970s and insisted that socialist lawyers must unite in public condemnation of these developments and in fighting for a platform of rights firmly anchored in popular support. John Wadham (the legal Officer of the NCCL, now Liberty)further detailed the assaults on civil liberties and outlined a view of the priorities for campaigning in the 1990s.
 
The plenary session was followed by student-chaired workshops in which discussion focused on developing specific campaigns against the Poll Tax, Third World debt, the abolition of the right to silence and for the release of the Birmingham Six and the Tottenham Three; proposals for transforming both academic and vocational legal education; whether law centres are central to socialist struggle; how to radicalise the practice of solicitors and barristers; and what contribution feminist, Marxist and/or poststructuralist theory might make to developing CLG analysis and policy.

The article in Law and Citique took the form of an interview with the student members of the NCLG. We reproduce extracts here as it reflects some of the continuing concerns and objectives of the CLGs.

Editors  - One of the themes which has emerged as pivotal for this issue is the very question of the relationship between students and teachers in the (legal) academic enterprise. To the extent that the editors of this issue are all poachers turned gamekeepers, ex-students left simply with memories of student life, it seemed to us important to try to elicit Student views and to record what students, today, might understand by the 'critique of law'. If the questions which follow seem at times forced or contrived, this is probably the result of the distance between the academic and the student. But it seems to us that law and critique can provide a forum for students as well as academics to engage in the development of the critique of law.

NCLG - Before attempting this questionnaire on, as you say, a broad assessment of the relationship between students and teachers, we feel it is important to comment on your attitude to this relationship as illustrated by your use of the poacher-turned-gamekeeper analogy.
 
This presumption of students as poachers implies that in order to equip oneself with the intellectual means to survive in a non-student world, we must first steal fragments of information from another's land. With this part of the analogy we find ourselves in certain sympathy; the academic game park is essentially 'theirs' and not 'ours'. In order to 'get on' we are obliged to make this arena our own and if you like we steal a degree on this basis.
 
The part of the analogy that really worries us is that of teachers as gamekeepers. Is it too simplified to say that the role of a gamekeeper is to restrict by any means the poacher's access to the benefits of the park? Is this really how you perceive yourselves? Are we labouring under a rather naive illusion that the role of a 'critical' teacher is more that of the highly skilled poacher indicating to her less experienced colleagues where the best game is to be had and not a structurally bound role to cast the poacher from the park in utter disgrace, without considering the starvation that might have brought this poor soul to such a way of life!
 
As critical lawyers we do not accept that these divisions are insurmountable or even real. The CLG is based on 'egalitarian', anti-hierarchical principles; we are all, if you like, 'poachers', bound by a common cause.
 
The fence that you feel on the other side of is not one necessarily constructed by the division between students and teachers. Political differences can be the only relevant and real fence; in the CLG teachers and students find themselves on the same side of the fence.
 
It is a mistake to define yourselves primarily by a role enforced from above and not of your own creation. As to the question of students acting as a 'crucial instrument in the games which teachers play', we do not accept this role as passive legitimators of others' positions.

Editors - How would you place yourselves? Who are you? Where would you say you are 'coming from'? You have taken the trouble of setting up groups not only on individual campuses but at national level. How uniform or consistent would you say the goals are that fuel what you are doing?

NCLG -  The CLGs have been formed as a response to the failure of the law to tackle a profoundly oppressive and unequal society. There are structural relations of exploitation and domination which the legal system reflects both externally and internally. The eradication of these relationships internally can only be a positive step towards change. The law, like other bourgeois ideologies, is taught as if it is just another set of facts, a manifestation of a 'natural' form of order emanating from a free society of individuals interacting as they choose. As critical lawyers we view this concept as inherently fallacious, For us, law must be viewed historically as it has developed to legitimise capitalism. We reject the 'autonomy of the law' ideology, and its implicit premise of a world consisting of competitive individuals engaged in isolated and intricate power games.
 
These are the shared premises of the critical lawyers' group, or, if you prefer,' where we are coming from' The goal of the national group is a demystification of the individualistic ideology that the law seeks to perpetuate. We seek to expose the gender, race and class conflict and exploitation which constitutes the law's raison d'etre.

Editors -  How would you describe the relationship of your movement to politics, at either the national or student level? To what extent are you concerned with the politics of vocationalism, professionalism, with especial regard to the politics of legal professionalism and vocationalism?

NCLG -  Our relationship to politics is not an interesting appendage to the movement but is central to all our analyses and activities. Obviously law students tend to look towards the legal profession. In order to build a critical perspective we must develop an understanding of the nature of that profession and its potential relationship to the struggle for social change. To this extent the issue of legal professionalism and vocationalism is a focus of debate. This has centred on the possibilities of a legal practice that may be a force for social change and in finding political rather than legal solutions to the problems that the legal profession attracts.
 
These questions have constantly cropped up in the activities of student-run law centres in which many members have invested much time and energy. There has been a tendency to search for exclusively legal solutions, thus reproducing the individualistic power relation between those with 'the knowledge' and those without; there is a danger that this can become a patronising philanthropic exercise. We are presently rethinking this approach with a view to greater involvement in campaigning around issues which the state seeks to submerge in legal definitions but which are in reality issues of class, race or gender.

Editors -  How do you see yourselves in relation to the legal profession, to the extent that this is the dominant relationship with which and against which law students tend to define themselves?

NCLG - The legal profession is clearly hierarchical. There is both the obvious stratification within the professional hierarchy and the underlying stratification along class, gender and racial lines. The former category pertains to the alienated roles which we are invited to adopt. These roles are defined by relationships of dominance and subordination. The latter category uses these personal characteristics to provide a so-called rational basis for social subordination. We do not define ourselves negatively in these terms but turn the definitions outwards to understand and clarify the dynamics of the world we live in.

Editors -  How do you see your position in relation to that of other law students, critical or otherwise, and in relation to other student bodies?

NCLG - Our relationship to other student bodies depends on common political ground. For example, we have little contact with groups such as the Young Conservatives. The structure of the CLGs is genuinely democratic. Communication between members on a local and national basis is of primary importance. Students, practitioners and lecturers are incorporated on this basis. We do not act with the confines of state requirements and as such we have often found ourselves in confrontations with other student bodies. This was clearly illustrated byKent's experience with the Student Union when providing a platform for a Sinn Fein speaker last February. Under the guise of bureaucratic requirements the University sought to censor the title of the talk, 'Legal and Illegal Repression in Northern Ireland', to restrict the numbers of persons attending, to supervise publicity and stewarding and to inhibit the use of the student radio station to broadcast the talk. The SU was prepared to accept these rules and was less than sympathetic in challenging the University's authority. Most of these 'requirements' were fought off and served to clarify the non-compromising position of the CLGs.

Editors -  What do you think of the current attempts at critical legal education? Do you think it is possible, or desirable, or important to get away from the sorts of hierarchical relations and effects Duncan Kennedy talks about?

NCLG - We accept much of Duncan Kennedy's analysis of how traditional legal education is both a training in subordination and a training for subordination. We must, as critical lawyers, seek in every possible way to 'subvert' this dominant tradition - to 'subvert' the law school if you like and to put at the centre of legal education (as with legal practice) the questions of Whose law? Whose values? Whose hierarchy?

Editors -  Do you think 'academic freedom' is important or 'meaningful' in faculties of law? Does it matter to students?

NCLG -  Obviously the quality of our education is an important issue for students. When academic freedom is directly restricted by right- or left-wing state control, critical education has been forced backwards. However, we are aware that academic teaching is dominated by bourgeois ideology and that academic freedom may serve as a guise for promoting reactionary ideologies and so called liberal or even radical educators may in reality act as 'soldiers with typewriters',

Editors -  How far do students take account of the internal politics of law departments? Are students pawns in others' games?

NCLG -   If by internal politics you are referring to the formulation of academic courses, we strongly believe that students and teachers should involve themselves in a constructive dialogue, exploring the possibilities that each course may offer. As to students being 'pawns in others' games', again you have assumed a strict division between student and teacher. If you believe this to be the case, is this questionnaire an example of such a game?

Editors -  How can issues of race, gender and class be tackled within law departments?

NCLG -  If legislation is conveyed to students on a neutral basis as just another approachable fact then issues of race, gender and class are not tackled. However, if placed in socio-political context, the purpose of such legislation is clarified. The law has failed to prevent racism. Anti-discrimination laws have been imposed on a structurally racist society. The law plays a dual and a contradictory role in legitimating this. The law's formal rejection of racism stands in stark contrast to the increasingly tighter immigration laws it institutes. In 1981 the Nationality Act restricted the residential rights of 'new' Commonwealth citizens in Britain. In 1988 the right to appeal against deportation for residents of less than seven years was abolished. In 1985 Winston Silcott was convicted of PC Blakelock's death without the usual prerequisite of evidence and without reference to the intense police harassment and murder of Mrs Cynthia Jarratt that preceded the Tottenham riots. By isolating the case from its social context the state was able to flame its victims.
 
The 'radical' approach to tackling the recession has meant that in real terms the working class has paid. This has meant increased repression facilitated by new legislation. Four anti-trade union laws have been instituted since 1979 and the Police and Criminal Evidence Act: of 1984 has extended police rights to stop and search. In 1985 the police gained the right to use CS gas and plastic bullets and the Public Order Act of 1986 extended police rights to restrain protesting individuals 'for the public good'. In reality this was instituted as a direct reaction to the miners' strike of 1984-5. The abolition of the right to strike is firmly on the agenda as is the abolition of the right to silence. The state's use of the law is clearly seen in its repression of Irish republicans. In 1988 the Prevention of Terrorism Act was made permanent and Sinn Fein was banned from the airwaves. We are increasingly policed. The Security Services Bill means that M15 may 'legally' tap our phones and the Official Secrets Act obliterates public access to information.
 
Gender discrimination is opposed by the law in the Sex Discrimination Acts but inequality is substantially upheld through the marriage relationship and property rights. The women's movement has tended to focus on radicalising the law without always being aware of the law's function in perpetuating a structural patriarchy.
 
The law is political acid must be tackled with that knowledge. Class, race and gender are the categories that must be central to any teaching of the law.

Editors -  How should and how can students take issue with doctrinal teaching?

NCLG -  Doctrinal teaching may be tackled firstly by our political approach which must by now be clear. Secondly, students must attempt to bridge the gap between doctrinal teaching, critical discourse and legal practice. They must link 'education, agitation and organisation', a marriage of theory and practice, in order to be a potent force for social change. The 'truth' about the law cannot emerge from an inward looking analysis of legal discourse and the contradictions therein. (With thanks to Law and Critique for their permission to Publish this extract.)

The need for more CLGs

We hope that this account will convince our readers of the need to expand the CLG network and encourage them to do so.
 
If you would like our help, do get in touch. For further information, contact;