Response: Fostering curiosity: The importance of research and teaching in law schools

Abstract

It is striking that, with nothing more than a few tweaks, Dawn Oliver’s Lord Upjohn Lecture on the integration of teaching and research in law schools could have been delivered today. Can it really be true that in nearly two decades almost nothing has changed? As I write, law schools have recently received the 2014 Research Excellence Framework results and have thus been released from the ‘state of some suspense’ in which Oliver wrote, as law schools then awaited the results of the 1996 Research Assessment Exercise. 1 It remains true that there are many excellent law teachers who do not engage in research activity to any significant extent and it is also still true that new universities on the whole carry out research activities which are more applied, teaching-focused and still seen as less valuable. Other debates about the pressures of workload for (legal) academics, students as customers and whether or not law is a vocational discipline are all so familiar to me that it is hard to believe they were penned almost 20 years ago - a year before I started my law degree in fact.