A couple of weeks ago, the UWA Public Policy Institute hosted a summit on Higher Education. On the back of that discussion, the CEO of the Group of 8, Vicki Thomson, shared this post on LinkedIn.
The post provoked a range of reactions from different people. My personal take was this post also on LinkedIn.
To be fair, Thomson did not mean to single out law schools, as she clarified herself in a later comment. Rather, she used law as a proxy to trigger a discussion on broader issues affecting tertiary education in Australia.
However, both the specific question she asked (do we need this many law schools?) and the context that prompted her to raise it (the possible maybe potential merger of some of WA’s public universities) are worth exploring.
Let’s start with the easy bit: is merging some of WA’s public universities (including their law schools) a good idea? Let’s be clear (and this is my own personal opinion, which does not reflect the views of UWA or of UWA Law School): in a context characterised by stagnating domestic enrolments, massive geopolitical uncertainty, a broken university governance model, and a shockingly dumb and dysfunctional funding model, merging a couple of unis is going to solve sweet bugger all – though it may give some consulting firms the ability to showcase whether they have upgraded their AI capabilities past a ChatGPT subscription. So, if it were up to me, I’d look into overhauling university governance and funding, and taking some serious care of our public primary and secondary education systems before playing at M&A as though universities were made of Lego tiles that you can simply shift around – NB: you can’t, as the South Australia experience is showing. However, it turns out this is very much not up to me, so I shall leave it at that.
Let’s move on to the interesting bit: do we have too many law schools? Specifically, do we have too many in WA – a state with a population of under 3 million people, currently boasting five law schools! It depends on what legal education is trying to achieve. Now, provided that this is a bit of an oversimplification, I see two main alternatives (and note from the outset that there is clearly a measure of overlap between the two).
The first alternative is that law schools exist for the specific purpose of ‘making lawyers’. This view certainly aligns with the historic roots of legal education as it developed in the Common Law tradition. It is a view inextricably linked to the idea that legal training is vocational by nature. Learning law used to be very much like learning a trade or an art, imparted by established professionals and passed down to apprentices. However, things have changed. Law schools have evolved as legal studies have morphed into an established academic field. Modern law faculties are dominated by full-time career academics, with practitioners providing invaluable input as external resources. Is this a bad thing? I think not. In fact, this shift opens the door to an alternative, and in my view much more compelling, interpretation of what law schools are for: creating thinkers.
This approach is historically more common in Continental Europe where legal education saw the shift from purely vocational training to academic discipline occurring much earlier. If one takes this view, the legal profession is just one option for graduates – an important one, certainly, but by no means exclusive and not necessarily dominant.
With a reduced focus on practice as a natural goal, legal education becomes more concerned with developing a rigorous intellectual framework. Legal studies provide students with unique opportunities to cultivate logical, analytical, and crucially, systemic thinking. For this to occur, contextual understanding has to be embedded at the core of the curriculum. Legal issues are always linked to broader politcal economies and societal structures. They are seldom ‘just’ legal – though they can certainly be addressed as such. For instance, it is one thing to establish whether a remedy would be available to a plaintiff in a given civil claim. It is another thing altogether to ask why that is or isn’t the case.
Why does this matter? At least two reasons.
First, because in the age of large scale AI, the number one characteristic that employers across pretty much every industry are looking for in new hires is critical thinking. In this environment, law graduates are a potential gold mine, and not just for law firms. Law schools should be embracing this reality, positioning their graduates not just as future practitioners, but as highly skilled problem-solvers equipped for emerging societal challenges across the board – be it in legal practice, government, buisness, arts, NGOs, academia, bartending, etc.
The second reason takes us back to the original question: should we merge two or more of the current WA law schools? Well, that depends. If they focus narrowly on making lawyers, and the natural career pathway is defined by clerkships, grad jobs (preferably at top tier commercial law firms), PLT and admissions, then there is certainly room to argue that we currently have too many schools servicing a finite legal market. But if we go for the alternative, and shape legal education as a training ground for the kind of sharp, systemic thinkers our chaotic world desperately needs, then, frankly, the more the merrier!
