ABSTRACT
There are certain enduring features of the landscape inhabited by legal education in the United Kingdom that are commonly reprised in writings on the subject. Often presented in oppositional terms, the features described generally include: academic/vocational; new/old university; teaching/research; skills/knowledge; City/citizen; Bar/Law Society and so on. Whilst analysis of sources of tension is useful to highlight trends and challenge positions, it suffers from a tendency to oversimplification and may obscure, rather than illuminate, alternative strategies. Not faint-hearted, the purpose of this book is to move beyond the conflict between the disparate agendas of those with an interest in the form and content of the law degree, to sketch fresh identities for law teachers. This chapter will set out to meet this objective by revising legal education: both by reassessing the arguments proposed by the main protagonists and by proposing new ambitions for law teachers in the 21st century.
