Chapter 4 Professor Gower, complacent academics and legal education

A young upstart?

In 1950, The Modern Law Review published an extended version of Professor L.C.B. Gower’s lecture as the Sir Ernest Cassel Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).¹ Inaugural lectures rarely generate much interest outside the audience of fellow academics, friends and family who gather to listen to the newly appointed professor. However, this inaugural lecture was different. Professor Laurence Cecil Bartlett Gower (known to all his colleagues as ‘Jim’)² was thirty-five years old, and as such, very young to be appointed to a named chair at a prestigious university. Nevertheless, it was not his comparative youth but the content of his lecture which was to attract attention. Although Gower was a company lawyer, he chose to devote his lecture to ‘English Legal Training’, examining both academic legal education and the vocational training delivered to those wishing to enter the legal profession as a solicitor or barrister.³ His lecture was subtitled ‘a critical survey’ and it was critical in the literal sense of the word, right from the first sentence: ‘The subject of legal education is one which has aroused singularly little interest in recent years and the general professional attitude to it is one of complacent apathy.’⁴ It becomes clear that by the ‘general professional attitude’ he is including the attitudes of legal academics, the legal professions … and the judiciary. As we shall see, it was his criticisms of judges which were really to ruffle feathers and draw external attention to his lecture, but legal academics and both branches of the profession were roundly criticised too.

This chapter will summarise the content of Gower’s article and place it in its historical and social context, examining what was radical about it and why that was the case, given the state of legal education in England at the time. It will go on to explain why Gower chose to make the arguments he did, and how those arguments were received by those they were directed at. The final section of the chapter will look at the extent to which Gower’s arguments are relevant today, and the importance of considering contemporary legal education in the light of his critique.

Critiquing legal education and training

Gower began by contrasting the position in England with regards to an interest in legal education and training with that of other Common Law jurisdictions, in particular North America, ‘where’, he noted, ‘the subject is perhaps the most widely debated of any legal topic’.⁵ In the United States, he went on, there were numerous special editions of journals on legal education, as well as the Journal of Legal Education itself and many books.⁶ However, in his opinion, English lawyers (both practising and academic) remained ‘blissfully ignorant of this ferment … rarely discussing the problem or apparently realising that there is a problem to discuss’.⁷ ‘Is our comparative complacency justified?’ he asked rhetorically; ‘Are our American colleagues making a fuss about nothing, or is our system so superior to theirs?’⁸

In the rest of the article (which ran to sixty-eight pages in total) Gower critically analysed the whole gamut of legal education, from the undergraduate law degree to the professional training of solicitors and barristers. Each stage comes in for blistering criticism. It is a detailed, closely argued examination of legal education and training, which draws on a wide range of literature. In this regard, Gower displayed his respect for the subject, treating it as worthy of serious academic study as much as any area of substantive law. This in itself was unusual; at the time, academic lawyers writing about legal education generally published descriptive articles outlining their views on ‘teaching methods’ or ‘curriculum review’. For example, the first volume of the Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law (now Legal Studies) to be published after the Second World War, covering the years 1947–51 (and thus contemporaneous with the delivery and publication of Gower’s lecture) contains twenty-one articles. Fourteen of them are about legal education, with titles such as: ‘The Teaching of Common Law and Its Practice’ and ‘The Revision of Courses of Legal Study at the University of Cambridge’.⁹ While there are honourable exceptions, overall there are few references to any relevant literature, and the approach adopted by the authors was almost entirely descriptive. In adopting a much more rigorous approach himself, Gower was implicitly sending a message about the intellectual standard which he thought should be adopted in academic debates about legal education.

Law in the universities

Gower first turned his attention to the question of how law should be taught in universities. He wanted to see an end to the situation then pertaining, in which most university law schools acted as law schools for the profession, by admitting articled clerks as students for a year (so that they could fulfil the Law Society’s training requirements). Since universities did not generally offer separate teaching for these students, the effect was to constrict academic legal education. Teaching the vocational students and the academic ones together was only practicable for law schools ‘if their degree syllabuses cover roughly the same ground as those of the professional examinations’.¹⁰ Better co-ordination between universities and the legal professions, Gower suggested, would enable a clear distinction to be drawn between academic legal education and professional legal training. He quoted with approval Professor Wade’s inaugural lecture, where Wade argued that law should be taught in universities ‘not as an exercise in professional technique, but in relation to its place in the world in which we live’.¹¹ Gower underlined his support for what we would now call a socio-legal approach by quoting with approval the American scholar, Professor Sydney Post Simpson: ‘competence in the practical pursuits of the law is promoted far more by an understanding of the law’s underlying purposes and theories than by acquaintance with tricks of the trade’.¹² Though Gower acknowledged that this might not yet be the approach taken in British universities, he was of the opinion that ‘they certainly come closer to it than the professional bodies can hope to do’.¹³

Gower developed his argument for teaching law in context, integrating what he called ‘non-legal’ material into the curriculum, so that law teachers would be able ‘to give some indication of the social and economic reasons and consequences of the rules that they expound’.¹⁴ He fully acknowledged the challenges this would involve, admitting that most legal academics found learning and keeping up-to-date with a few areas of law quite time-consuming enough, without attempting to master other disciplines.¹⁵ He was also sceptical about the ability of academic lawyers to engage in rigorous interdisciplinary analysis of their subjects, commenting that ‘any lawyer who attempted to deal with many of the economic aspects of commercial law would be rightly suspect in the eyes of professional economists’.¹⁶ His solution was to suggest that there should be increased collaboration with other faculties, including seminars taught jointly with colleagues from other disciplines.

The whole point of this approach to law teaching, for Gower, was to encourage students to critique the legal system.¹⁷ He supported Wade’s argument that ‘law should be taught as a great human institution serving social and economic ends’.¹⁸ Not only did he identify the intellectual challenge facing contemporary legal educators who wished to pursue this approach but he also noted that academics had a fear of becoming involved in politics, so they were reluctant to engage in interdisciplinary teaching, which would inevitably involve criticising the law. While he agreed that law teachers should not bring their own party politics into their teaching, he was nevertheless clear that they should be more proactive in criticising the law.¹⁹ Gower’s ‘socio-legal’ approach was quite different to the prevailing orthodoxy. In 1948 Professor W.T.S Stallybrass was the President of the Society of Public Teachers of Law (SPTL) (now the Society of Legal Scholars) which was at that time the only professional association of academic lawyers). In his Presidential Address to the Society, he made it abundantly clear that in his opinion there should never be speculation about what the law ought to be, since that ‘gets us near to the field of sociology. My own profound conviction at the present day’ he went on ‘is that the first essential of University teaching is that it should be objective and objectivity is difficult when you come to Sociology. I feel that is one of the great dangers of the increasing development of social studies in the University’.²⁰

Gower clearly would not have agreed with such sentiments, and was soon able to demonstrate in his own teaching the broad approach which he advocated, reflecting this in the textbook on company law which he published in 1954. Entitled Principles of Company Law, it was extremely well received, precisely because it took a completely different approach to that which was generally adopted. At the time, company law was regarded as ‘very technical and dull’.²¹ Some legal academics regarded it as unsuitable as a field of academic study, and it did not generally feature as a subject of undergraduate law courses.²² Gower’s book, on the other hand, was ‘a breath of fresh air’ in comparison with older treatises on English company law.²³ It was a book which was regarded as defining the subject of company law, and the approach taken was contextual, analysing the history behind the development of company law, as well as pointing out the issues of economic and social policy which it raised.²⁴ In an appreciation of Gower’s life, after his death on Christmas Day 1997 at the age of eighty-three, the Modern Law Review commented: ‘Seldom can a textbook have made such a radical change in so short a time in the status of a legal subject.’²⁵ Thus, when Gower argued in his inaugural lecture that legal academics should adopt a broader approach to legal education, he was soon to demonstrate exactly what he was talking about.

Gower went on to criticise the law curriculum, which in his view was based upon the assumption ‘that the lawyers we train will devote their lives exclusively to private practice … and all they need is the knowledge of legal rules and skill in applying them to the facts of new cases’.²⁶ Instead, he argued that Public Law should feature much more prominently in the legal curriculum. This was something he had written about before. In 1948 he had published another article in the Modern Law Review, entitled ‘The Future of the English Legal Profession’.²⁷ In it, he argued that, in post-war England, social changes would lead to corresponding changes in the legal system. The expansion of social services delivered by the state, nationalisation of key industries and an increasing level of bureaucratic control would lead to the production of more law, and that law would be public law rather than private law.²⁸ ‘As the state increases its social services and its control over fields left previously to private enterprise, the growth of Administrative Law in the Continental sense seems inevitable …’²⁹ New laws would be implemented through statutes, which made the teaching of statutory interpretation much more important. Although some attempts were made to teach it, they were in his view ‘half-hearted’ and there was generally little attention paid to public law, despite its growing importance. The insistence on focusing on private law ignored the fact that only a minority of students would actually go into private practice, with the others undertaking a very wide variety of roles, from civil servants to politicians, teachers to magistrates’ clerks. It was clear to Gower that his students needed ‘something very different from a narrow training in legal technique’.³⁰ Gower’s analysis directly reflected the approach of the School of Law at the LSE, which had long championed the importance of public law.³¹

Next, Gower turned his attention to the possibility of improving university legal education, setting out a suggested syllabus. In so doing, he was at pains to emphasise that he was not suggesting that all law departments should follow exactly the same syllabus: ‘indeed, a certain amount of local variation is a good thing since without it new experiments would be impossible. Nevertheless, having declared that it is for the university to decide upon a fixed syllabus, I feel that I must go boldly forward and give my views on what that syllabus should be.’³² Gower’s proposals do not appear to modern eyes to be particularly unconventional in terms of subjects to be covered. However, at the time they would have been regarded as much more radical. His syllabus was as follows:

YEAR 1:

• Legal method and the place of law in social research
• English Legal System
• Elements of English Private Law
• Constitutional/Public Law

YEAR 2:

• Contract
• Tort
• Criminal Law (including penology and criminology)
• Land Law (including Trusts)

YEAR 3:

• Administrative Law
• Family Law
• Jurisprudence
• Comparative Law.³³

His suggested syllabus did not include Roman Law, which in itself was a radical suggestion. In his Presidential Address to the SPTL delivered in 1947,³⁴ only two years before Gower delivered the lecture on which his article was based, Professor Smalley-Baker commented that looking back at Addresses delivered in the previous decade, he had found ‘scarcely a single year in which the value and importance of the study of Roman Law has not, like King Charles’ head, crept into our discussions’.³⁵ Gower regarded its retention in the syllabus as a relic of the old-fashioned view that ‘to have some knowledge of Roman Law was culture’ and did not see it as having any academic utility, except as part of a comparative law course.³⁶ He was also keen to introduce a different type of English Legal System course, recognising that students at the time were just expected to pick up legal research skills, together with statutory interpretation and precedent, as they went along, since most Legal Method courses were essentially courses on legal history.³⁷ He was particularly exercised about the failure of legal academics to teach their students legal research skills: ‘We cannot claim to have taught lawyers how to use the tools of their trade unless we instruct them in the use of textbooks, reports, digests and indices, and they cannot derive much benefit from the rest of their training unless they know how to use them’.³⁸ What he wanted to see were courses in English law schools similar to those already delivered in America under the title of ‘Legal Method’.³⁹ Gower’s ideas about improvements to be made to the law syllabus were born not only from his observations as a law teacher but also from his own experience as a law student: no law teacher had told him about the utility of the Index to Legal Periodicals or the digests of cases, ‘and I remember that for some time I had an exaggerated admiration for the industry and erudition of the late Lord Halsbury under the mistaken belief that he had written the whole thirty-seven volumes of The Laws of England’.⁴⁰

Training barristers and solicitors

Gower’s critique of legal education continued as he contemplated the training of barristers, which also got short shrift. After matriculating, they needed to ‘keep terms’ by dining for three years, during which time they could earn nothing from legal practice, with few opportunities for outside earnings (since they could not engage in anything that the Bar Council regarded as ‘trade’). During those three years, the two parts of the Bar examination had to be passed. After they had been ‘called to the Bar’, students could ‘read in chambers’ to gain some practical experience.⁴¹ However, as Gower pointed out, there was no compulsory theoretical training, no compulsory practical apprenticeship, and no compulsory institutional attendance. Students were merely ‘recommended’ to attend the Inns of Court School of Law and to read in chambers.⁴² And although there were compulsory exams, Gower regarded them as considerably easier than an LL.B. or the Solicitors’ Finals. ‘No-one, I imagine, would seriously contend that the mere fact of passing the Bar Final is proof that one is decently well qualified for the duties which a barrister may be called to discharge.’⁴³

It was much more difficult to qualify as a solicitor. After matriculation (or passing the Law Society’s Preliminary Examination), students had to be articled for five years, during which time they had to pass the Law Society’s Intermediate and Finals examinations. If they were not a Law graduate, they had to attend an approved law school for at least a year within fifteen months of commencing articles.⁴⁴ Gower’s criticisms of solicitors’ training were centred on the lack of academic training. Although those without a law degree had to attend an approved law school, the time was actually spent being trained to pass the Law Society’s examinations, so there was general agreement that the ‘statutory year’ was of little educational value.⁴⁵ When it came to articles, there was no way of guaranteeing their quality; it depended on whether the principal was conscientious. And even with a good principal, the practical experience, based on whatever work the principal did, could be very limited. The Law Society’s Final Examination came in for particular criticism: ‘The candidate is required to take six papers each of twelve questions ranging over almost every conceivable subject. Every question has to be answered and the candidate has only fifteen minutes to read, understand and to write an answer for each.’⁴⁶ The result of this approach was that the majority of questions merely tested memory; which was, in Gower’s view ‘the crammers’ joy’.⁴⁷ Teachers at the professional law schools were also obliged to ‘teach to the test’, doing little more than dictating notes.⁴⁸ Clearly, this left a lot to be desired in terms of education.

Finally, both branches of the profession were criticised for the financial barriers to qualification which they did little to relieve. While there were some scholarships available for those intending to practise at the Bar, the same was not true of the solicitors’ profession. Both branches of the profession, wrote Gower:

value their exclusiveness and the rules of both branches seem deliberately designed to preserve it by imposing financial barriers in the form of premiums, pupillage fees and especially by prolonging the period of unpaid apprenticeship … Such practices are relics of the days when wealth and education went hand in hand, but now that education is no longer the prerogative of the rich, and we are all, whatever our politics, wedded to a policy of equality of opportunity, they seem anachronisms.⁴⁹

He went on to make detailed suggestions for the improvement of the training courses for solicitors and barristers, essentially suggesting that they focus on teaching subjects relevant to practice, rather than replicating subjects that students had already studied as undergraduates; he also suggested that training for the profession should include a course on legal ethics (which in the light of the recent Post Office scandal, seems a particularly perspicacious remark).⁵⁰

Academics, the legal professions and judges: shooting from the hip!

It was when he turned to the topic he labelled ‘Practitioners v Teachers’ that some particularly controversial elements appeared in Gower’s analysis. Noting the gulf separating legal academics from legal practitioners (increased by the advent of university law teaching as a full-time job, rather than a task carried out part-time by practitioners), Gower commented that the situation:

might not be serious if the two sides were regarded as of equal status; but they are not; the academic side is very definitely regarded as on a lower plane and to a practitioner academic distinction is not a professional asset but a liability to be concealed at all costs.⁵¹

He contrasted this unfavourably with the situation in North America, where practitioners and legal academics respected each other as experts, where there was ‘a constant interchange’ between practice and academia, with academics becoming judges and judges becoming law professors, and legal academics were held in high esteem by their judicial colleagues.⁵² In a remark which appears to have been born out of bitter experience at successive meetings of the SPTL (of which he was to become president later in his life),⁵³ he said: ‘nothing is more nauseating than the patronizing air of mock humility usually affected by one of his Majesty’s judges when addressing an academic gathering’.⁵⁴ He conceded that the situation might be changing, as recent addresses delivered to the SPTL had not been so patronising, and he singled out Lord Denning for his ‘encouraging tribute to the value of academic studies’.⁵⁵ But, he went on, legal academics were partly to blame for this situation: ‘It is my submission that English teachers of law suffer from an acute inferiority complex and that this is a bad thing for the profession as a whole.’⁵⁶ He wrote with approval of the way in which in North America, much more attention was paid to legal education than in England ‘and the best of the law schools are constantly experimenting with new courses and new teaching methods and attacking each other’s ideas with a freedom which is a refreshing contrast to the back-scratching prevalent in academic circles here’.⁵⁷ And he complained that published criticisms by law teachers on decisions from the House of Lords downwards ‘are apt to be so moderate and humble that it is sometimes difficult to be sure that they are criticisms at all’.⁵⁸ He went on to comment that ‘more outspoken attacks on judicial decisions (such as are found in the American Reviews) would probably be a healthy development’.⁵⁹ The implication of this remark appears to be that if judicial decisions were subjected to rigorous academic scrutiny, the quality of future decisions could be improved (assuming the judges took account of the academic analysis of their decisions).

Gower was also critical of the quality of legal academics as teachers. When selecting legal academics, more emphasis needed to be placed on teaching ability, he argued; but retention of academic staff was a problem, due not only to the terms and conditions of employment of academics but also to their social status. Since barristers were poorly remunerated in the early years of practice, they frequently took up lectureships in order to support themselves while they built up their practice. But once they were established, they left academia. Being a barrister was not only more lucrative; barristers were usually held in much higher regard than university lecturers, so young men (and in those days it was young men) preferred to pursue a profession which gave them status, as well as money.⁶⁰ Gower argues that the main way to address both the poor status and poor salaries of legal academics is to introduce a substantially higher rate of pay for legal academics than that given to academics of other disciplines.⁶¹ While he acknowledged the challenges involved in this approach, he also criticised the legal professional bodies for their ineffectiveness as far as their academic colleagues were concerned. Despite their claims of being ‘efficient trade unions’ they displayed, in his view, a complete inability to support law teachers to achieve higher salaries in the same way that the British Medical Association had done for medics.⁶²

Gower concluded by calling for an inquiry into legal education and training (though he acknowledged that this was unlikely to occur). But he also urged his fellow-academics to take a much greater interest in legal education: ‘Legal education must become and remain a live question.’⁶³ He made a number of suggestions about the ways in which the SPTL could support this, for instance by introducing a validation system for law schools, as well as concerning itself ‘far more than it does with the conditions and remuneration of the teaching side and become something in the nature of the law-teachers’ trade union’.⁶⁴

Reaction

Gower’s article, with its sustained barrage of criticism, aimed at legal academics as well as both branches of the legal profession and the judiciary, must have been, says Glasser:

a considerable culture shock for members of the legal establishment … Not only was the attack, made by a 36-year-old academic, unprecedented, but its tone of sarcasm and the self-confident manner with which the lecturer presumed to sit in judgment on professional lawyers and find them wanting, must have seemed little short of a revolutionary attack.⁶⁵

While some legal academics may have shared his views, they certainly had not expressed them in public (perhaps reflecting the lack of confidence which Gower had criticised). The judges, completely unused to such a public challenge, were outraged. Gower had not only criticised the bad manners displayed in their attitudes towards legal academics but also indicated that more robust analysis of their decisions by independent-minded legal academics might be beneficial. The Law Lords summoned the editor of the Modern Law Review, Lord Chorley (as Glasser puts it, Gower’s presumed commanding officer) ‘to be solemnly reproved for ever allowing such criticisms to be published’.⁶⁶ While this reaction would be unthinkable today, Glasser reminds his readers that in 1950s Britain, the legal system was at the heart of a number of reforms which led to heightened anxiety within the judiciary. There were suspicions that the new system of legal aid would lead to government control of the legal profession, while Lord Jowitt, the Lord Chancellor in the post-war Labour government, was strongly resisting proposals to establish a Ministry of Justice.⁶⁷ Glasser argues that such challenges to the status quo of the legal system go some way to explaining why the Law Lords reacted so strongly to Gower’s criticisms. Some legal academics took a similarly dim view of Gower’s ideas: reflecting on his lecture many years later, when he was president of the SPTL, Gower remembered that ‘A distinguished member of the Society – now, alas, no longer with us – was moved to publish a disapproving note in a rival law review, which he concluded by saying that he wished me a long and happy tenure of my post but hoped that my influence on legal education would be nil’.⁶⁸ But while some legal academics were unenthusiastic about Gower’s ideas, his lecture was much more positively received by others, with Professor Kahn-Freund later referring to it as ‘magnificent’.⁶⁹

Why Gower?

As a company lawyer, it would have been the general expectation that Jim Gower would have delivered an inaugural lecture on his primary area of expertise. So what was it about his personal context at the time that influenced his choice of legal education and training as the subject of his inaugural? It appears that teaching was something he took very seriously. Professor Cretney, in the memorial essay he wrote for the British Academy after Gower’s death in 1997, noted that Gower claimed that ‘being interesting’ was the most important quality of a university lecturer, and that he drew large numbers of students to his lectures.⁷⁰ His interest in legal education also extended to the postgraduate researchers at the LSE; he appears to have been genuinely interested in the well-being of these students. Aware of the isolated existence they commonly experienced, he invited them to his home, where, together with his wife, he offered them hospitality, including ‘croquet on the lawn and party games after tea’.⁷¹ Voluntarily giving time to his students in this way provides further evidence of his commitment to what we would now call ‘the student experience’.

But it was not only his desire to teach well and ensure his students enjoyed life as postgraduates which suggests why Gower was keen to talk about legal education and training in his inaugural lecture. His family background, and his own experiences of studying law, and training to be a solicitor, appear likely to have given him a particular interest in the subject. Lawrence Cecil Bartlett Gower was born in 1913 at Forest Gate, Essex, into a family which he described as ‘upwardly mobile lower middle class’.⁷² Gower’s father began his working life as an office boy but rose to be company secretary and chief accountant of Ingersoll Rand, a large engineering company.⁷³ However, the family experienced mixed financial fortunes as Gower was growing up, including the bankruptcy of his father, who also suffered financially during the financial crisis of 1929; despite this, Gower was educated privately, at Lindisfarne College, which he described, not entirely positively, as ‘a private school with ambitions to become a public school’.⁷⁴ The fluctuating financial circumstances of his childhood appear likely to have given Gower a keen sense of the need for financial stability. On leaving school he became an articled clerk to a solicitor who agreed to take him on without payment of the usual premium. Unfortunately, the solicitor died unexpectedly; during his search for replacement articles Gower discovered that if he obtained a law degree, the period of articles would be decreased from five years to three years, enabling him to earn a salary more quickly. He enrolled at University College London and graduated with First Class Honours in 1933, following this by successfully completing an LL.M. in 1934 at the age of twenty-one. He then served the remaining part of his articles with the firm of Smiles and Co. in Bedford Row in London (in recognition of his academic success Smiles and Co. also waived their premium). He worked on major company flotations and international commercial transactions, and was admitted as a solicitor in 1937.⁷⁵ As was customary at the time, Gower received no salary during the period of his articles, but he accepted a position as a part-time tutor at University College, for which he was paid £150 a year.⁷⁶

Gower’s own financial position, together with his experience of his father’s financial difficulties, appears to have made him particularly sympathetic to the plight of those in society who were not financially well off. Thus it is unsurprising to find that after the war, along with his university friends Arnold Goodman (later Lord Goodman, Master of University College, Oxford and a major figure in English public life) and Dennis Lloyd (later Lord Lloyd of Hampstead QC, Quain Professor of Jurisprudence in London University and Dean of the Faculty of Laws at University College London) Gower established a legal clinic in the Commercial Road in the East End of London.⁷⁷ Since there was no legal aid until after the implementation of the Legal Aid and Advice Act 1949, legal clinics such as this played a vital role in assisting less advantaged families who needed legal advice. So, when he came to consider the training of solicitors and barristers his criticisms of the financial barriers erected by the profession to aspiring solicitors were grounded in personal knowledge and experience.

But in addition to his interest in teaching, and his awareness of the financial barriers faced by aspiring solicitors and barristers, Gower’s lecture was also grounded in his professional expertise, both as a practitioner and an academic. He had returned to Smiles and Co. after the war ended, and worked as a salaried partner. However, immediately after the war Lord Chorley, who held the Sir Ernest Cassell Chair of Commercial Law at the LSE, was given two years’ leave in order to join the incoming Labour government. When he asked for the leave to be extended, it was refused, and the LSE approached Gower. Cretney notes that Gower’s acceptance of the post in 1947 was influenced by the fact that he could earn more as a Professor than as a salaried partner at Smiles and Co.⁷⁸ (The favourable pay of academics relative to practitioners did not last long, so Gower may have come to appreciate the additional income, as well as the opportunity to retain a link with his previous career.)⁷⁹ Gower retained a relationship with Smiles and Co. until the early 1960s, when he resigned from the LSE and took up a post advising governments in Africa on legal education, as well as becoming dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Lagos.⁸⁰ Gower’s continuing experience as a practitioner, together with his role as an academic, meant that he was particularly well placed to critique both the academic and the vocational aspects of legal education.

Was the criticism justified?

Although Gower expressed his criticisms of legal education and training more forcefully than his contemporaries, he was not alone in thinking that reform was needed. Professor Hughes Parry’s address as president of the SPTL in July 1949 was entitled ‘Some Reflections on Legal Education’.⁸¹ At the time, he was head of the Law Department at the LSE; just as his colleague Jim Gower would do when he delivered his inaugural lecture at the LSE the following year, Hughes Parry noted that a range of matters relating to legal education were discussed with much more vigour in America than in England. He also suggested that legal education and training was in need of reform, in particular the duplication of coverage by professional training courses of subjects already covered in the undergraduate degree.⁸² Like Gower, Hughes Parry was critical of the rates of pay awarded to legal academics; acknowledging that differential rates of pay, such as those enjoyed by medics teaching in universities were controversial, he thought the SPTL should discuss the issue.⁸³ In the discussion which followed Hughes Parry’s address, Gower, foreshadowing the comments he would make in his inaugural lecture, said that he regretted that no-one had taken up the point about the purpose of legal education which the president had raised. ‘As a comparative newcomer, he had hoped to learn what we teachers of law really were trying to do’ (the implication being that, on the whole, legal academics didn’t give much thought to this issue).⁸⁴ It appears that Professor Montrose, of Queen’s University Belfast, was of a similar mind to Gower. After listening to Mr Landon’s Presidential Address to the SPTL he said in the discussion that followed that he did not agree with the president that ‘the task of the law teacher was confined to descriptive exposition of legal rules; some judgment about those rules had to be expressed’.⁸⁵ In the context of the 1950s, given that Professor Montrose’s ideas about legal education appear to be along the same lines as those of Gower, it is no surprise that Cownie and Cocks tell us that during the rest of the discussion ‘there [was] no record of anyone coming to his support’.⁸⁶

It should not go unnoticed that Jim Gower delivered his inaugural lecture as the Sir Ernest Cassel Professor of Commercial Law at the LSE. In the context of that particular law school it is likely that he found much more support for his views. This was not only true of his head of department, Professor Hughes Parry, as we have seen. It was true of the department in general. It was a law school which had a particular view of law, described as ‘a core belief, appropriately nurtured in a school of social sciences, that law should be treated, both in research and teaching, as a social phenomenon’.⁸⁷ The approach advocated by Gower directly reflected its collective philosophy. The department saw itself as assuming a pioneering role in legal education and research. It was an approach also reflected in the Modern Law Review, of which Gower was one of the founding members.⁸⁸ He is listed in the first edition of the journal (in 1937) as one of the six members of the editorial committee, taking the role of editor for cases and statutes.⁸⁹ From its inception, the journal was to champion a ‘law in context’ approach. In the very first issue, the editorial committee included a note setting out their position; it argued that the doctrinal approach to law, while needed, was not in itself sufficient, as a means of teaching and researching law, because ‘it isolates law too much from those contemporary social conditions in which it must always operate’.⁹⁰ This approach to legal scholarship is exactly what Gower had referred to in his article when he quoted with approval Professor Wade’s comment that law should be taught in universities ‘not as an exercise in professional technique but in relation to its place in the world in which we live’.⁹¹ Wade himself was not a lightweight: the quotation is taken from his inaugural lecture as the holder of the Downing Chair of Law in the University of Cambridge, and he was a distinguished constitutional lawyer.⁹² Thus, although Gower’s views challenged the prevailing orthodoxy, and worked in a law school where such views were supported, he was by no means the only person to hold such beliefs about the appropriate way to teach and research the law.

Nevertheless, reading Gower’s criticism of the legal education and training offered by universities and the legal professions, one might wonder whether, in 1950, his views were those of a maverick who worked in a radical department of law, or whether he was pointing to a truth which others seem, in the main, to have refrained from expressing. Commentators often turn to the views of presidents of the SPTL, expressed in their presidential addresses, as being representative of the ‘mainstream’. At the time Gower’s article was published, the SPTL was the only professional association for academic lawyers, and as such, it represented the collective public face of a large number of legal academics. Reflecting on legal education in the 1950s, Abel-Smith and Stevens, in their seminal book Lawyers and the Courts, noted that ‘The function of university law teaching was as unclear in 1945 as it had been sixty years earlier. Yet the complacent attitude of pre-war years carried over into the post-war years’.⁹³ They singled out the SPTL Presidential address given in 1948 by Professor W.T.S. Stallybrass, an Oxford Law don who was at the time also the vice chancellor of the university. His view of legal education was very narrow, and Abel-Smith and Stevens comment that ‘the idea of analysing or criticizing the policies embodied in doctrines or the actual operation of legal principles did not come within [his] concept of a liberal education’. Stallybrass was not alone. The president of the SPTL in 1952 was Mr Landon, another Oxford don, who told his audience that although ‘law teachers should certainly take an active interest in law reform he hoped that their teaching would never degenerate into expounding sociology to potential lawyers’.⁹⁴ These two speeches, delivered in the years just before and just after Gower’s inaugural, reveal exactly the mindset that Gower was challenging.

Subsequently, it has become even clearer that Gower’s critique was not that of a maverick. In the context of the history of the SPTL, Cownie and Cocks comment that ‘The Society’s activities for the period 1945–55 reveal a time dominated by a powerful form of academic conservatism … There was outright condemnation of sociology and anything hinting of the contextual explanation of law’.⁹⁵ Their comment chimes with the views expressed by a number of expert commentators to the effect that legal education in the late 1940s and early 1950s had a very narrow focus. Twining notes that academic law in the 1950s ‘was still not highly regarded by either the universities or the profession … and several law faculties saw their main function as preparing local articled clerks for the Law Society’s examinations’.⁹⁶ Parry comments that Gower ‘brutally’ exposed ‘the intellectually moribund climate that had infected the English law school for most of the early and middle part of the twentieth century’.⁹⁷ Sugarman argues that during the post-war period, ‘The centrality of private law, legal doctrine, courts and cases was strenuously defended for its practical and educational values and for its objectivity, and it was claimed that the development of the social sciences threatened objectivity and law’s singular claims to respect’.⁹⁸ Twenty-five years after Gower published his article, Professor J.W. Bridge of Exeter University published his own inaugural lecture, ‘The Academic Lawyer: Mere Working Mason or Architect?’⁹⁹ The title was derived from Sir Walter Scott’s novel Guy Mannering, a scene in a library, when Pleydell, a lawyer, says: ‘These are the tools of my trade. A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect’.¹⁰⁰ In the context of legal education, Bridge interprets the mason as a skilled technician who is not capable of adapting to new ideas or developing new materials and techniques. An architect, in his view, is a virtuoso, a person of imagination and inspiration; skilled in traditional methods, architects are aware of their inadequacies, and can devise new techniques and develop new materials to meet the challenge of change.¹⁰¹ This metaphor would surely have appealed to Gower, as would Bridge’s subsequent comment that:

By the 1950s, there were established law schools in universities, but on the whole they were small and not well-equipped … Within the limits of orthodoxy the teaching was sound but tended to be unimaginative … In 1951 in a book concerning law reform, to which academic lawyers contributed, it was said that “the drive of law teaching is towards protecting dead practices of the past against the imperative needs of the present. It is hostile to analyses of the law in action. It is largely ignorant of foreign experience and it suffers from complacency … It fails to criticise with the appropriate penetration. It gives us legal habit without legal philosophy.¹⁰²

The views of Bridge and other subsequent commentators of legal education in the 1950s, published in the later twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, suggest that there was considerable justification for Gower’s views.

Jim Gower’s other criticisms, of the training of solicitors and barristers, based as they were on a detailed analysis of the situation facing young people who wished to embark on a legal career, backed up by multiple examples of the inadequacies of the training regimes of both branches of the profession, were also difficult to refute. His critique of the patronising attitudes displayed by the judiciary appears to have been grounded in personal experience, and the reaction of the judges to his remarks suggests that they were certainly not used to any effective challenge from members of the academy at that time. So although Gower’s views were certainly not part of the prevailing orthodoxy, both contemporary and subsequent academic opinion indicate that his criticisms were justified.

Gower’s concluding remarks

Despite the weight of evidence about the need for improvement, Gower himself had mixed feelings about the prospects for reform. He concluded his lecture by calling for the establishment of an inquiry into legal education and training. In the face of apathy from the professions and the difficulty of getting them voluntarily to co-operate with the academy, he argued that there was ‘an overwhelming case’ for the establishment of a royal commission to carry out such a review.¹⁰³ However, he noted that ‘It must be confessed that our recent experiences of such inquiries in this field have not been very encouraging, but I cannot believe that this need be so, particularly if its terms of reference were framed sufficiently widely …’.¹⁰⁴ Gower had ambitious proposals for the reform of legal education and training: he was clear that ‘Legal education must become and remain a live question’.¹⁰⁵ To achieve this there had to be co-operation between the professional bodies and the SPTL. They could, for example, host visits of distinguished academics from other jurisdictions. Meanwhile, the SPTL should publish an annual ‘Guide to the Study of Law’, providing information about institutions which offered legal education ‘and this should include, and not ignore the professional coaching establishments and other non-university institutions’.¹⁰⁶ He had further suggestions for the SPTL, putting forward an extensive action-list. The SPTL should in his view establish an accreditation process for law schools, similar to that which already existed in America ‘so that bad law schools would be black-listed’. It should also include representatives from the professional bodies on its committees and concern itself much more with the conditions and remuneration of legal academics, so that it became more of a trade union for law teachers.¹⁰⁷ Gower was certainly not short of ideas for positively improving the legal education and training which he had so roundly criticised.

Legal education and training (re)-considered

Re-reading his article in 1977 when he was president of the SPTL (by which time he had become vice chancellor of the University of Southampton) Gower said wryly: ‘To my surprise, it did not lead me to say “My God, what genius I had then”. On the contrary, I said “My God, could I ever have been so conventional?” … the fact is, unbelievable though it now seems, that at the time what I wrote was regarded by some as pretty strong meat’.¹⁰⁸ It was, of course, the reaction of the senior judges, affronted at being criticised in print by a mere legal academic, that was the most noticeable reaction to Gower’s article. It would be virtually unthinkable nowadays for the senior judiciary to complain about academic critique in the way they did in 1950, but what about Gower’s criticism of the attitude of legal academics to the senior judges? He thought that legal academics lacked confidence and were very obsequious in relation to the judiciary.¹⁰⁹ His views echo those of his erstwhile colleague at the LSE, Harold Laski, who, in an extensive correspondence with the celebrated American judge, Mr Justice Holmes, wrote about attending a law teachers’ dinner in 1925 at which the judiciary were present. ‘The judges’ he wrote, ‘had a most amusing sense of infinite superiority and the law teachers as interesting a sense of complete inferiority’.¹¹⁰ While legal academics today are happy to analyse and critique judicial decisions, has the legal academy completely shrugged off its sense of inferiority? What about those occasions where there is a prestigious lecture to be delivered, or a keynote speaker to find for an annual conference? Do legal academics take the opportunity to showcase eminent scholars, or is there a continuing tendency to invite a senior judge to speak on these occasions? Both judges and academics have important things to say about the law. Have we got the balance right, allowing both types of lawyer to have their moment in the sun?

Gower was self-deprecating about his suggestions for the legal curriculum. But the fact that it looks quite familiar nowadays should give pause for thought. He made those suggestions more than seventy years ago. Has legal education made sufficient progress since that time? We might be proud of all the different options we offer, reflecting, in some cases, new legal specialisms which did not exist in 1950. But has legal pedagogy moved on in ways that would satisfy the man who said that ‘being interesting’ was the most important quality of a university lecturer? It is not only a question of making the delivery of lectures or tutorials stimulating for students. Do the textbooks we write contribute to the excitement of learning law? Since textbooks are generally accepted not to ‘count’ for the purposes of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) unless they clearly fall within its criteria, do we write them at all, let alone exciting ones? Is it just not worth the risk that they will not ‘count’?

And do we give legal education the respect that Gower gave it, reflected not only in the fact that he, a company lawyer, chose to devote his inaugural lecture to it, but also in the way he developed it into a sixty-eight page article, referencing the legal education literature (such as it was at the time) in the same rigorous way he went about his company law research. Is there significant evidence that the contemporary legal academy is significantly less complacent about legal education than Gower’s contemporaries in 1950? He commented that there was ‘an astonishing paucity of published material on the topic’ as compared with North America, where it was ‘quite common’, he went on ‘for a whole issue of a law review to be devoted to it’.¹¹¹ While there are many more legal textbooks to support student learning than there were in the 1950s, as well as a wide literature on the practice of teaching in higher education, it remains the case that many generalist legal journals publish few articles on legal education.¹¹² The Law Teacher, first published in 1967, remains the sole specialist legal education journal based in the UK. The reasons for the paucity of articles in well-regarded generalist journals are unclear; consecutive REF panels have commented on the lack of ‘methodological rigour and significance’ in some legal education outputs, and this may be one of the explanations.¹¹³ However, it may also be the case that many very able academic lawyers are simply not sufficiently interested in education to devote their time to researching the area. Does this mean that there is a danger that legal academics today, at least as regards their practice of, and attitudes towards, legal education, suffer from the same complacency that Gower complained of in 1950? It is a sobering thought.

And what of training for the legal profession? It is still the case that it is not necessary to possess a law degree or indeed any degree, to become a solicitor.¹¹⁴ There is still little co-ordination between the academy and practising lawyers.¹¹⁵ Gower said of the Solicitors Final Examination that, so far as possible, examiners tried to set searching questions ‘but no candidate can be expected to deal with twelve of them in three hours, and hence the papers have to be diluted with questions which merely test memory, and these, of course, are the crammer’s joy’.¹¹⁶ His view was that professional examinations should not cover subjects already studied at university but should test candidates’ ability to deal with the sort of problems solicitors faced in practice, tested by extended questions, answered over a day, with candidates being given copies of relevant statutes to consult; an additional oral examination should test the ability to deal with papers from a ‘real-life’ case.¹¹⁷ This approach to assessment, he argued, meant that ‘cheating would become virtually impossible, and the menace of cramming be eradicated’.¹¹⁸ The mode of assessment for the Solicitors’ Qualifying Examination (SQE), which was introduced by the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority (SRA) in 2021, is a two-part examination: SQE 1 tests ‘functioning legal knowledge’ and SQE 2 tests ‘practical legal skills and knowledge’.¹¹⁹ SQE 1 consists of two multiple choice examinations.¹²⁰ Each of these examinations has 180 questions.¹²¹ SQE 2 consists of an oral examination (taken over two consecutive half days) and a written examination which requires candidates to answer twelve written legal skills assessments.¹²² SQE 1, involving 360 multiple choice questions to be answered in six hours, and still covering subjects such as Tort and Contract, which law graduates will have studied at university, bears a remarkable resemblance to the Solicitors’ Finals examination which Gower was criticising in 1950. SQE 2, with its twelve written assessments, has also drawn much criticism. Expressing his concerns about SQE 1, Unger comments that ‘It is not clear how legal complexity and ambiguity can be assessed by questions that take an average of 90 seconds to answer’.¹²³ A series of articles in The Law Teacher in 2018 laid out a range of criticisms, from the damage done to Law as a discipline, to the dangers for any university claiming that its LL.B. will offer advantages in passing the SQE due to the need to comply with advertising standards and the likelihood that efforts to widen participation in the legal professions to a more diverse group of students will be thwarted by the existence of the new assessment regime.¹²⁴ Although some of these criticisms reflect contemporary concerns, such as the continuing need to increase equality and diversity in the legal professions, criticisms of SQE 1, in particular, bear an uncanny resemblance to the concerns Gower voiced seventy-five years ago. The Bar remains a graduate profession; there is a year-long full-time or equivalent part-time professional training course, followed by a year’s pupillage to become fully qualified.¹²⁵ Pupil barristers are now paid during the year that they are training, which was not the case in the 1950s.¹²⁶ However, for young people wishing to enter either branch of the profession, the financial barriers remain high. Most students will access a student loan to fund their undergraduate study, and will need to then undertake the relevant vocational training after graduation, involving courses which are very expensive. The introduction of the SQE, for instance, has spawned a large number of courses intended to ensure that candidates are fully prepared to pass the SQE. The cost of such courses is generally more than £5,000.¹²⁷ The financial assistance offered to those aspiring to join the legal professions, generally by way of scholarships or by winning open competitions, is limited – often generous for those who are successful, but for those who are not, the financial barriers which Gower pointed to in 1950 remain high, accompanied by the risk that there is no guaranteed employment after qualification. For aspiring solicitors and barristers, while the situation has improved since the 1950s, joining the legal profession remains an expensive and risky proposition for many.

Conclusion

When considering whether Professor Gower’s 1950 article remains of interest today, it is the audacious ambition with which he approached his subject matter which has the most to say to us. Whichever part of the legal education and training regime he looked at, he was able not only to express cogent criticism, but to offer suggestions for radical reform. The sheer scale of this one piece of academic work is breathtaking. His final sentence ran: ‘The vital need therefore is to awaken interest in this country in the problems of legal education and training, and that must be the excuse for this monograph.’¹²⁸ Seventy-five years later, with the exponential growth of artificial intelligence affecting legal education as much as anything else within the academy, the challenging global political situation where human rights and the rule of law are under threat, and questions being raised, in the light of the Post Office scandal, about the professional ethics of the legal professions, the need for legal scholars to take an interest in legal education and training is more important than ever.¹²⁹

Notes

1. * I would like to thank Professor David Sugarman, Professor Tony Bradney and Professor Rosemary Auchmuty for their very helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. Any errors remain the responsibility of the author.

2. 1. L.C.B. Gower, ‘English legal training: a critical survey’, Modern Law Review 13, no. 2 (1950): 137 and see www.lse.ac.uk/law/centenary/history. The actual lecture (a much shorter version) had been delivered on 24 January 1949.

3. 2. https://www.lse.ac.uk/law/centenary/history. Accessed 11 November 2022.

4. 3. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 137.

5. 4. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 137.

6. 5. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 137.

7. 6. At the time he delivered his inaugural lecture, Gower had not visited the United States, but he was a visiting scholar at Harvard in 1954–5 and was the Holmes Lecturer at Harvard in 1966; see ‘Jim Gower – An Appreciation’, Modern Law Review 61, no. 2 (March 1998): 128.

8. 7. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 138.

9. 8. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 138.

10. 9. F. Raleigh Batt, ‘The teaching of the common law and its practice’, Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law (NS) 1 (1947–51): 3; H.A. Hollond, ‘The revision of courses of legal study at Cambridge’, Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law (NS) 1 (1947–51): 105.

11. 10. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 155 and 159.

12. 11. E.C.S. Wade, ‘The aim of legal education’, Cambridge Law Journal 9 (1945–7): 288.

13. 12. Sidney Post Simpson, ‘The Function of the University Law School’, Harvard Law Review 49, no. 7 (May 1936): 1068–83.

14. 13. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 161.

15. 14. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 178.

16. 15. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 173.

17. 16. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 178.

18. 17. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 174.

19. 18. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 178.

20. 19. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 175.

21. 20. W.T.S. Stallybrass, ‘Law in the universities’, Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law (New Series) 1, no. 3 (1948): 157–69.

22. 21. K.W. Wedderburn, ‘The Principles of Modern Company Law. By L. C. B. GOWER, LL.M.(Lond.), Solicitor of the Supreme Court, Sir Ernest Cassel Professor of Commercial Law in the University of London. [London: Stevens and Sons, Ltd. 1954. xl and 574 and index 25 pp. 45s.]’ Cambridge Law Journal 13, no. 1 (April 1955): 118.

23. 22. Stephen Michael Cretney, ‘Lawrence Cecil Bartlett Gower, 1913–1997’. In Proceedings – British Academy 101, no. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 387.

24. 23. Louis Loss, ‘The principles of modern company law. By L.C.B. Gower. London: Stevens and Sons Limited, 1954. Agent for U.S.A.: The Carswell Company Limited, Toronto. Pp. xl, 599. $7.65.’ Yale Law Journal 64, no. 7 (June 1955): 1081.

25. 24. ‘Jim Gower – An Appreciation’, 130.

26. 25. ‘Jim Gower – An Appreciation’, 130.

27. 26. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 169.

28. 27. L.C.B. Gower, ‘The future of the English legal profession’, Modern Law Review 9, no. 3 (October 1946): 211.

29. 28. Gower, ‘Future of the legal profession’, 212.

30. 29. Gower, ‘Future of the legal profession’, 212.

31. 30. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 169.

32. 31. Richard Rawlings, ‘Distinction and diversity: law at the LSE’. In Law, Society and Economy: Centenary Essays for the London School of Economics and Political Science, ed. Richard Rawlings (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997), 7.

33. 32. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 178.

34. 33. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 180–81.

35. 34. The SPTL was renamed the Society of Legal Scholars in 2001: see Fiona Cownie and Raymond Cocks, ‘A Great and Noble Occupation!’: The History of the Society of Legal Scholars (Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2009), 254.

36. 35. C.E. Smalley-Baker, ‘The teaching of law as one of the social sciences’, Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law (New Series) 1, no. 2 (1947): 71.

37. 36. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 180.

38. 37. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 179.

39. 38. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 179.

40. 39. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 179.

41. 40. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 179.

42. 41. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 148–9.

43. 42. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 150.

44. 43. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 150.

45. 44. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 149.

46. 45. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 152.

47. 46. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 154.

48. 47. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 154.

49. 48. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 154.

50. 49. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 156.

51. 50. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 184–6. On legal ethics, see Richard Moorehead, ‘Hamlyn Lectures 2024’, ‘Frail professionalism: Lawyers’ ethics after the Post Office and other cases’, https://sites.exeter.ac.uk/lawbulletin/2024/08/09/hamlyn-lectures-2024/, accessed 13 November 2024.

52. 51. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 198.

53. 52. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 198.

54. 53. See Cownie and Cocks, ‘A Great and Noble Occupation!’, xii.

55. 54. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 198.

56. 55. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 199.

57. 56. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 198.

58. 57. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 137.

59. 58. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 175.

60. 59. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 175.

61. 60. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 200.

62. 61. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 201.

63. 62. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 201.

64. 63. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 205; italics in original.

65. 64. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 205.

66. 65. Cyril Glasser, ‘Radicals and refugees: the foundation of the Modern Law Review and English Legal Scholarship’, Modern Law Review 50, no. 6, (October 1987): 704–5.

67. 66. Glasser, ‘Radicals and Refugees’, 705.

68. 67. Glasser, ‘Radicals and Refugees’, 705. See also Gavin Drewery, ‘Lord Haldane’s Ministry of Justice: stillborn or strangled at birth?’ Public Administration 61, no. 4 (Winter 1983): 408, where the author refers to ‘a well-documented fit of apoplexy’ on the part of Lord Jowitt, faced with proposals for a Ministry of Justice.

69. 68. L.C.B. Gower ‘Looking Back’, The Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law (NS) 14, no. 3 (March 1978): 155.

70. 69. Otto Kahn-Freund, ‘Reflections on Legal Education’, Modern Law Review 29, no. 2 (March 1966): 121.

71. 70. Cretney, ‘Lawrence Cecil Bartlett Gower 1913–1997’, 386.

72. 71. Cretney, ‘Lawrence Cecil Bartlett Gower 1913–1997’, 387.

73. 72. Cretney, ‘Lawrence Cecil Bartlett Gower 1913–1997’, 379.

74. 73. Cretney, ‘Lawrence Cecil Bartlett Gower 1913–1997’, 379–80.

75. 74. Cretney, ‘Lawrence Cecil Bartlett Gower 1913–1997’, 381.

76. 75. Cretney, ‘Lawrence Cecil Bartlett Gower 1913–1997’, 382.

77. 76. Cretney, ‘Lawrence Cecil Bartlett Gower 1913–1997’, 383.

78. 77. Cretney, ‘Lawrence Cecil Bartlett Gower 1913–1997’, 382 and 383.

79. 78. Cretney ‘Lawrence Cecil Bartlett Gower 1913–1997’, 386.

80. 79. On academic pay in the 1960s, see Cownie and Cocks, ‘A Great and Noble Occupation!’, 90.

81. 80. Cretney, ‘Lawrence Cecil Bartlett Gower 1913–1997’, 392.

82. 81. D. Hughes Parry, ‘Some Reflections on Legal Education’, Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law (New Series) 1, no. 4 (1949): 249–57.

83. 82. Hughes Parry, ‘Some Reflections on Legal Education’, 253.

84. 83. Hughes Parry, ‘Some Reflections on Legal Education’, 255.

85. 84. Hughes Parry, ‘Some Reflections on Legal Education’, 256.

86. 85. ‘Annual Meeting of the Society, 1952’, Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law (New Series) 2, no. 1 (1952–4): 32.

87. 86. Cownie and Cocks, ‘A Great and Noble Occupation!’, 70.

88. 87. Rawlings, ‘Distinction and Diversity: Law and the LSE’, 1.

89. 88. Gower is listed as the editor for cases and statutes, a member of the founding ‘Editorial Committee’ which had six members. ‘Editorial Notes’, Modern Law Review 1, no. 1 (June 1937): 1.

90. 89. ‘Editorial Notes’, 1.

91. 90. ‘Editorial Notes’, 1.

92. 91. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 161, quoting Wade, ‘The Aim of Legal Education’, 288.

93. 92. Wade, ‘The Aim of Legal Education’, 286–7.

94. 93. Brian Abel-Smith and Robert Stevens, Lawyers and the Courts: A Sociological Study of the English Legal System 1750–1965 (London: Heinemann, 1967), 365.

95. 94. ‘Annual Meeting of the Society, 1952’, 32, quoted in Cownie and Cocks, ‘A Great and Noble Occupation!’, 70.

96. 95. Cownie and Cocks, ‘A Great and Noble Occupation!’, 81–2.

97. 96. William Twining, Blackstone’s Tower: The English Law School (London: Stevens and Sons/Sweet & Maxwell, 1994), 30.

98. 97. R. Gwynedd Parry, David Hughes Parry: A Jurist in Society (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010), 22.

99. 98. David Sugarman, ‘ “Great beyond his knowing”: Morton Horwitz’s influence on legal education and scholarship in England, Canada and Australia’, in Transformations in American Legal History: Law, Ideology and Methods – Essays in Honor of Morton J. Horwitz, vol. II, ed. Daniel W. Hamilton and Alfred L. Brophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 307.

100. 99. J.W. Bridge, ‘The academic lawyer: mere working mason or architect?,’ Law Quarterly Review 91 (1975): 488.

101. 100. Sir Walter Scott, Guy Mannering (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1886), 264 quoted in Bridge, ‘The academic lawyer’, 488.

102. 101. Bridge, ‘The academic lawyer’, 488.

103. 102. Bridge, ‘The academic lawyer’, 488.

104. 103. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 204.

105. 104. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 204.

106. 105. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 205 (italics in original).

107. 106. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 205.

108. 107. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 205.

109. 108. Gower, ‘Looking back’, 155.

110. 109. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 175.

111. 110. M. de Wolfe Howe (ed.), Holmes–Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916–1935, 2 vols (1953) quoted by Bridge, ‘The academic lawyer’, 491–2.

112. 111. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 137.

113. 112. Between 2020 and 2025, there were no such articles in the Modern Law Review, one in Legal Studies and two in the Journal of Law and Society, though more extensive bibliometric analysis of the latter reveals that legal education is one of the most frequently discussed themes in the journal: Christian Boulanger, Naomi Creutzfeldt and Jennifer Hendry, ‘The Journal of Law and Society in context: a bibliometric analysis’, Journal of Law and Society 51, no. 1 (March 2024), 19–20.

114. 113. See Research Excellence Framework 2014: Overview Report by Main Panel C and Sub-panels 16–26, https://2014.ref.ac.uk/panels/paneloverviewreports/index.html, accessed 15 February 2025 and REF 2021 Overview Report by Main Panel C and Sub-panels 13 to 24, https://2021.ref.ac.uk/publications-and-reports/main-panel-overview-reports/index.html, accessed 15 February 2025.

115. 114. The Solicitors’ Regulation Authority states that candidates wishing to enter the profession must possess ‘a degree in any subject (or equivalent qualification or work experience’. https://sqe.sra.org.uk/about-sqe/what-is-the-sqe, accessed 15 February 2025.

116. 115. An exception to the general trend is the Committee of Heads of University Law Schools Pracademia Seedcorn Funding Scheme, which aims to encourage collaboration between legal academics and practitioners; see https://chuls.ac.uk/786-2/, accessed 15 February 2025.

117. 116. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 154.

118. 117. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 195–6.

119. 118. Gower, ‘English legal training’,196.

120. 119. https://sqe.sra.org.uk/about-sqe/what-is-the-sqe, accessed 15 February 2025.

121. 120. https://sqe.sra.org.uk/about-sqe/what-is-the-sqe/how-the-sqe-works, accessed 15 February 2025.

122. 121. https://sqe.sra.org.uk/news-item/2023/07/10/the-solicitors-qualifying-examination-managing-the-pressure, accessed 15 February 2025.

123. 122. https://sqe.sra.org.uk/exam-arrangements/assessment-information/sqe2-assessment-specification#assessments, accessed 15 February 2025.

124. 123. Andy Unger, ‘Legal education future(s) – the changing relationship between law schools and the legal profession’, in Key Directions in Legal Education: National and International Perspectives, ed. Emma Jones and Fiona Cownie (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 8.

125. 124. The Law Teacher 52, no. 1 (2018): 409–98.

126. 125. https://www.barcouncil.org.uk/becoming-a-barrister.html#stages, accessed 16 February 2025.

127. 126. https://www.barcouncil.org.uk/becoming-a-barrister/i-am-a-pupil-barrister.html#fundingawards.

128. 127. See for example, the online course offered by Barbri: https://www.barbri.com/sqe/faqs, accessed 16 February 2025.

129. 128. Gower, ‘English legal training’, 205.

130. 129. For more information about the Post Office scandal, see the Hamlyn Lectures 2024, delivered by Professor Richard Moorehead under the title ‘Frail Professionalism: Lawyers’ ethics after the Post Office and other cases’. https://sites.exeter.ac.uk/lawbulletin/2024/08/09/hamlyn-lectures-2024/, accessed 17 February 2025.

Selected bibliography