A site supporting my book
Following a few months of revisions and checks, the book is now out! You can read more about it on the Edward Elgar pages, where you can also read the first chapter free.
It’s not been easy, and I am not at all sure I’d want to to do it again. But I am pleased it’s now out there, and I hope people find it of interest and use.
Hello again! I got the proofs earlier this week. There aren’t too many things to respond to, but I will be going through the MS thoroughly after I have dealt with the comments and requests.
Now it’s in production the book has its own page! Head over to the Edward Elgar site to see it. All being well it’ll be out in May. I think it’ll mainly find its way to university / college libraries.
Now, as a librarian do I teach about OA- yes! Do I recommend it- yes! Would I have liked the book to be OA? Yes, but I’m not sure I’d have secured funding for it. Were I to write another book, I’d look at the OA possibilities for sure, including the diamond options that are available.
I will be looking into whether I can make a chapter available on our repository, at least between now ish and when the book appears.
I sent the files in to Edward Elgar today. Next, wait to see what the editor has to say. Thanks for being with me so far, and I’ll post again when I hear back…
Of writing this book. Or at least, the draft I’ll submit!
What does it look like?
Intro- looking ahead to the book. Sets the context- the importance of law and the need for people to know it, challenges to the university and law school, engagement as one way to respond to both of those those areas. Underlying idea is the law school *can* respond to challenges, but in a systemic and co-operative way- a challenge in market environment…
History- a *very* broad overview of university and law school history, focusing on England. Highlighting the current challenges of neoliberalism, the liberal / vocational divide, and how that divide can be- and has been- transcended. Roles of the university and law school- teaching, research, engagement.
Engagement- again, a *very* broad history- of engagement this time. Defining engagement- connecting with the world, understanding the world, responding to the world. The public understanding of law as an aspect of engagement, with a closer look at public legal education and information. The wider institutional context of engagement- organisational systems, ideals and values, and options and choices. The delivery of engagement- ideals and outcomes, methods and people. The challenges of engagement. How engagement can be delivered. This chapter might be split up…
Public understanding of law- defining publics- as groups both created by issues and the work of law schools, and as creating themselves. How the law school connects with, forms an understanding of, and responds to publics. How the public experiences and sees the law. How the law school works with the law. What understanding the law is- using ideas of legal literacy, capacity, and capability. What delivering understanding aims at, what it looks like, and how you know it’s worked (or not…) This chapter might be split up…
Examples- drawn from various law schools. Includes law clinic and other areas *not* about public understanding of law, but PUL is the focus. Common elements are identified.
Model- drawing on institutional context and critical realism, broader issues are covered- structure. agency, culture. Focusing on engagement delivery, activity theory is adapted to look at elements from examples. The two are then connected. To see this in action, two imaginaries- the Hilltop and Riverside law schools- are used- looking at how they respond as institutions, and how they deliver engagement.
Conclusions- summary of the book, and some alternatives- ways of being a university (commons, co-ops) and of moving beyond the university.
Why yes, I do go for a ‘lost electropop album title vibe’ for post titles 🙂
Couple of months to deadline and the MS is a mix of the nearly done and the 3 : ??? stages. My process, such as it is, remains constant.
At this stage, new ideas float in and out. Especially about the structure and the ‘golden thread,’ the way it all hangs together. So, where are we to with that?
Well, there are a few basic ideas:-
1 Engagement is important and valid. But it is not necessary that everyone do it, or do it in the same way.
2 To realise 1, a system approach is needed. And a collaborative one at that. Thinking of law schools as a whole, with some doing engagement in one way, others in another; some doing more basic research, others building on it. Difficult in a competitive world of HE, but doable I think.
3 Engagement needs to be rooted in mutuality- of understanding, of effort, of respect for knowledge, and of outcome.
4 Engagement in the law school often expresses something of the ‘signature pedagogy’ of the law school-problem solving and advice. So, it’s law clinics and its policy. And this is good. But a ‘clinic +’ approach takes in Streetlaw / PLE, information creation, discourse support; connecting engagement to the idea that it is ‘real people’ with ‘real issues’ who are the core of clinic, not (simply) ‘law firm like experiences.’ Such thinking also allows for emerging ideas around legal design to find a place.
So to the structure. The base is good old questions- why, who, what / how? Why do engagement, who’s involved, what are they doing? Literature, examples, and interviews help answer them. Why is all about ideals, values, motivations; who about the law school and the publics; what is about how things are done, but also about the underpinning assumptions and techniques of how we do engagement. And around them all, the possibilities-affordances of the law school.
Then another question- what does it mean? How can we bring all this together? It’s here that models / philosophy appear, however lightly sketched. Realist ways of thinking about the institution and its why-who-what; and activity theory helping us think about engagement on the ground, and the why-who-what there. With a bit of knowledge mobilisation and boundary work added in.
Then the imaginaries- Rutland re-revisited and the new Riverside. How could the model be applied to both describe, analyse, and deliver engagement in a law school? What would happen in curriculum and research design? How might it affect organisations, reward systems?
There’s currently things in the MS which may need to be trimmed down. I need to discuss decolonisation for example, as it relates to engagement and the ways in which it can assist the law school; but mainly point to existing work in the field.
Panic? Yes, always some low level panic. But having a structure to work within, even where it means giving some things up… well that helps a bit 🙂
What is it?
Now I don’t propose to definitively say once and for all what law is or isn’t in my book. Clever, or at least more determined, people have gone over this before me and I will be using some of their work for sure.
But I will consider what people think the law means, both in the law school and in the wider communities with whom they engage. I think it’s very important, if somewhat matter, when thinking about the public understanding of law to think about well what do they understand that law to be?
Before the law school can develop interventions or collaborations to develop accurate understanding of what the law is, or more critical reflections of what the law could be, it needs to address what they and the public think the law is.
If when talking about the law what you really mean is legal services, you’re likely to head towards interventions which assist people in understanding and working with those services. Law clinics would be a very good example here. People are thinking about the law as services which they might receive from legal professionals, and a legal system in which they require advice and potentially representation. The law is something which they must deal with in a particular moment and particular context. This is the just in time aspect of helping people work with and understand the law.
In talking about the law you might be thinking about legal services quite narrowly. You might be thinking about how legal services are delivered, about the regulation and structure of legal services and legal professionals. And this might point towards a more just in case kind of intervention common public legal education helping people understand how legal advice is structured, how legal professionals are trained and regulated and so on.
Or you might when talking about the law be talking about the work of a legislature. You are thinking about how statutes other forms of legal instrument come to be. And again this points potentially try more just in case public legal education focused kind of work, connecting perhaps with broader citizenship of civics kind of education.
And perhaps you’re thinking about law as a system as a set of rules, reflecting a particular political and historical context. Through public legal education with a critical and reflective element, you work with the public to understand the situated and contingent nature of the law in all its various manifestations.
Because of course none of the things we’ve discussed is the law in total, the law is made-up of all of these things. And at the root of each of these things is an experience of the law, an encounter with the law, in one of these aspects. It’s just that some of these aspects are more obvious to people, they happen to people more perhaps. People are more aware of for example courts and legal advice than they are of the processes of legal creation, or of the historic and political context in which law is created.
So when thinking about what interventions can be done, what collaborations and partnerships can work, it is important to think about what do people need and want from the law school in relation to their experience of and understanding of the law. It is important, as several colleagues have said to me when I’ve been talking to them about the book, to start with the public situation with the law as much as with the law schools expertise and knowledge.
And that requires the law school itself to reflect on what does it understand by law and how is this reflected in its teaching. And they can take from engagement the public understanding of what the law is incorporate that into its own understanding developing a better appreciation of how the law is experienced by people as a set of services, as a set of systems, and as a set of situated and contingent people, places, and rules.
Here’s a couple of excerpts from the current drafts…
“The law school offers two useful ways to frame discussions around the role of the university and public engagement. Firstly, the tensions and debates in the law school around its role and purpose reflect those of the wider university, the tension between vocational and liberal approaches to the purpose of higher education.
The nature of law as both a body of knowledge and as a practice provides a lens for considering the role of knowledge and practice in the university, the aims of sharing knowledge ‘as it is’ and the critique of such knowledge and practice, and the role of the university in creating and critiquing such bodies of knowledge and practice.
Secondly, the role of the law in society makes the law school an ‘obvious’ candidate for public engagement. In all jurisdictions people need to know what the law is and how it works in order to make effective use of it, for positive and negative reasons; it also helps people participate in politics if they understand the processes of law making and how policy connects to it.
Using the law school in this way, the book is ‘thinking with’ the law school to understand the wider issues of public engagement, as it then moves to ‘think about’ the law school as an example of these issues and the importance of considering ‘local’ issues of history and discipline context.
Alongside its role in thinking from the law school to public engagement, considering the role and works of public engagement also offers a way to think into the law school. As the law school works with and for wider communities it will work with a range of ideas, experiences, and understandings relating to the law. These offer forms of epistemological insight and open up the law school curriculum and research to alternative ways of understanding the law, allowing for change in teaching and research.
Through these developments, public engagement can form part of efforts at decolonising the law school by problematising its curriculum and research and providing a way to think from and with (and not just thinking about) other forms of legal knowledge, experience, and possibility .
Thinking from / with communities is an aspect of ‘learning from’ alongside ‘learning about ’ practices and communities. It can also be linked with the ‘just in case’ aspect of public legal education, in which people learn about law because it may be useful and such learning has value in its own right, contrasted with the ‘just in time’ feature of law clinics, where the law school is responding to immediate need.
These ways of thinking from / with / about / to reflect the nature of public engagement as a two-way process in which publics and the university learn about and from each other, developing just in case knowledge and capabilities, even as they may benefit from just in time services and resources.
“Thinking about universities and their context, the aims and roles of universities, invites us to think about the university as a whole and how we might understand the way in which all of these things come together.
We can look at the university in terms of three connected ideas. There is the university as a system. When we focus on the law school we will be thinking about its curriculum, its research, and how these are structured and delivered. We are thinking about the ways in which decisions are made, how resources are allocated. We’re thinking about what the law school might look like if we were to put it down on paper as a set of diagrams and policies.
And this system in some way expresses a set of ideas. There are ideas and values about what this paper university or law school should look like and how it should work, and then there’s the reality of how those ideas and values play out against some of the constraints of the broader system which inherits policy areas and ideas from wider values outside the university.
Finally there are the choices to be made, and there are the possibilities within which the university and law school work. And the system and idea elements reflect the interplay of different values, different contexts, different policies which create this sense of the choices that the university can make.
These three elements interact, they are considered separately as each bit enables us to think about important parts university, where we remember that they inform one another-they shape and are shaped by one another. At any given time the system will appear to be the most obvious part of the university, it is the thing that we can see and it is the thing which exerts great influence.
But over time as new ideas emerge and interact and shape the system, as new choices evolve and are made and reflect ideas and change the system, so there is a process both of maintenance and change. And when we think about any aspect of the university, for example engagement in this book, we think about how that particular thing emerges from the interactions of systems, ideas, and choices.
And as we continue thinking about the systems ideas and choices of the law school, an important aspect of engagement is where it fits within the law school. How does it relate to teaching and research for example? Is engagement something separate from those two roles, a specialist activity carried out perhaps by specialists for its own sake? Is it a mission of its own?
Or can engagement be part of teaching and research, connecting with them more closely than it does where engagement is carried out purely as a mission of its own? Is there a way for engagement to be integrated with teaching and research, or to inform how these things are carried out?”
Thinking back to ‘Inspiration,’ one of the ways in which I’m approaching the book is the idea of ‘thinking with.’ I came across this idea in Hans Schilderman’s thesis. Hans is one of the people I’m thinking with- his idea of the commons as an organising / thinking principle for the university, and how what I discuss in the book could be a ‘waypoint’ towards the commons…
Who else? I’ve already mentioned Russell Sandberg. From him I’m taking the idea of legal history as a vital part of legal education, and more generally how the curriculum can- should– change to make it more critical and challenging.
And from Foluke Adebisi, the importance of understanding that the history of law is the history of how it has been used, in particular its role in colonialism and coloniality. This means that curriculum change is not just a matter of adding a decolonised reading list or some new modules, but involves a rethink of the law school and its role in making the law. And when thinking about public engagement, the law school needs to think not just what does the ‘public’ know about the law, but what is their experience of the law? Where- in space, time, and knowledge- are publics in relation to the law, and the law school? It needs to understand law as relational, and as a place of absences and fractures as much as reason and common sense.
And of course, William Twining- his Rutland imaginary and his more recent work on reforming and reimagining legal education; of particular importance, his emphasis on the law school role in developing the public understanding of law.
From activity theory, I’m building the model of public engagement. Thinking about public engagement, there are important elements- the people, things they do, how they do them, the ways they do them, the whys of doing them, and what happens. Or:
I’ll modify the language and diagram for these things, to suit them to engagement- following in the footsteps of others.1 The main element at the moment is Community / Division of Labour. It’s here I think that the law school can make the move beyond current thinking, by really understanding the publics with which they work and their histories / experiences. Community becomes almost an aim in itself, to better understand publics and through this to build relationships.
To tie all of this to the bigger picture of the university, critical realism, again following others both in the use of CR to discuss the university2 and in connecting CR to activity theory.3
Just got to write it all now! Also, got some interviews lined up…
1 Mcmillan, J. (2009.) Through an activity theory lens: Conceptualizing service learning as ‘boundary work’ https://doi.org/10.5130/ijcre.v2i0.1143; Bennett, M., Fiedler, B., and Finklestein, N. (2020.) Refining a Model for Understanding and Characterizing Instructor Pedagogy in Informal Physics Learning Environments //doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.16.020137
2 Barnett, R. (2018.) The ecological university. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/The-Ecological-University-A-Feasible-Utopia/Barnett/p/book/9781138720763
3 Wall, P. et al. (2016.) Combining Critical Realism, the Morphogenetic Approach and Activity Theory: A Proposed Framework for the Study of Mobile Health (mHealth) in Sierra Leone.
So, yes, I’ve not done so much writing recently. A lot more ‘wrangling’ and thinking about writing.
So, following the previous post I’ve been wrangling the structure / flow. The imagined audience for the book is legal academics, mainly but not only in the UK. These academics are also interested in public engagement- they may even be doing it. They will appreciate a model, but are not necessarily looking for a lot of in your face theory.
The structure then:
Intro- what is coming up? what are you going to get out of this? Broad international background leading to an English focus, moving from university and engagement generally to the specifics of the law school, before moving back out to a model. The model can be used to plan and analyse engagement.
History and nature- bit of background on the university and law school. This has been done elsewhere in much more detail; this chapter is a summary of this and sets the scene for my approach to the university and law school. Introduce the ‘missions’ of the university- teaching, research, engagement- as aspects of knowledge.
Engagement- pick up the broad discussion in History / nature chapter and develop it. What is engagement? What does it look like? And what does it look like in law? What challenges arise? Distinguishes various forms of clinical education and engagement- separating service from education-information– as well as looking at policy work, design, and provision of space / resources. Leading in to 3 chapters which look at aspects of public understanding of law as the educational / informational engagement contribution of the law school.
Public- who are the publics of public engagement? How do they come into being? How do they relate to the law school?
Law- what do the publics think the law is, and how do they engage with it? And how does the law school?
Understanding- what does it mean to understand the law? How does this relate to engagement?
Examples- bringing together the public / law / understanding chapters by seeing how these elements are reflected in examples of public engagement with law work. In these examples, the works will be set in broader institutional contexts. They will also be linked to how the law school teaches and researches.
Modelling- drawing on the examples to model the university-law school elements of systems, ideas, and opportunities (institution) and the engagement elements of people, aims, ways of delivery, and relationships (works.) These are then presented via the imaginaries of Rutland (drawing on Twining) and Riverside, discussing how law schools deal with their context and how this leads to particular engagement works.
Summary- what have you read? What does it mean? What next?
The underlying theory aspects… critical realism (system / ideas / opportunities being structure, culture, agency) and activity theory (modified for engagement,) Plus elements of boundary work, knowledge mobilisation, and decentering approaches to law.
As ever comments welcome. I will do some writing soon 😉
I’ve been doing a lot of writing! Or, to be accurate, repurposing of older work. Things written for one purpose / audience, things which were put aside but are now useful. But they need to be reworked for the new audience and purpose.
This has meant changing the tone some times. At others it’s the assumptions; things need a bit more spelling out for the book, but then again not too much. For example, there’s a very detailed history of English legal education. That needs to be covered, but there also needs to be some stuff on other jurisdictions. This means editing down the existing chapter and rejigging it to incorporate the new material.
And then there is the ongoing structure / flow issue. Moving from the general issues to the particular, keeping a consistent thread to help the reader along. That thread is examples+model, without getting too heavily into the model early on and not giving too much detail about the examples either, until the right time.
Topic sentences, discussions, topic recaps. Repeat, link. move on.
In other practical news, waiting for ethics clearance to do some interviews. These will give a bit of life to the discussion of examples, and a bit of richness to what would otherwise be a lit review plus what I reckon 😀
Public understanding of law 