Changing academic requirements for lawyers: yes please!

[Extract] The Law Admissions Consultative Committee ('LACC') has called for submissions in its review of the academic requirements for admission to legal profession in Australia ('Review'). The Review is the latest in a series of discussions and mini-reviews over the past decade or so about Australian admission requirements. This has occurred largely against the background of calls by the judiciary for more emphasis on statutory interpretation in Australian law schools. The sequence of events: reports, submissions, recommendations etc as to statutory interpretation is canvassed in the Review. At the same time, the Australian Productivity Commission has handed down a report into access to justice ('Report'). Chapter seven of the Report covers legal education and makes recommendations including that the Priestley 11 be reviewed (recommendation 7.1). The Priestley 11 are the core academic requirements for admission to practice in Australia, and must be taught by a law school to become an accredited degree. The Report and the Review are interesting to read together. While obviously they are addressing different purposes, they contain inconsistencies that perhaps lay bare the conflicted status of the law degree. I might observe that Margaret Thornton has been exposing this for some decades now. In this post I will focus on the LACC Review. In particular I respond to some of the questions it poses about the academic requirements. As a starting point though, I will outline the conflicts inherent in the very notion of legal education