The third meeting of the Nottingham Law School Legal Education Group was held on Wednesday 4th March 2009. The LEG, led by Becky Huxley-Binns and Jane Ching, engages in research in legal education and as a result aims to raise the profile, internally and externally, of the teaching quality within Nottingham Law School. This meeting, led by Graham Ferris, discussed some different ways to consider values in education, in higher education and in legal higher education. Graham adopted a matrix, represented below, to structure the discussion. The bottom row is blank to represent an analytical space that has not yet been explored but will in time involve a consideration of the concerns of others in legal education, whether such concerns are legitimate, how they might be interpreted, and by whom; matters which are far from straightforward. Graham is currently researching legal education in the affective domain (with colleagues across the UK) and research has shown that legal education can harm students to a measurable extent. There is reason to believe that the identification and explicit integration of ‘values’ can remove the alienation of the subject matter to the student and increase engagement, purpose and understanding. Graham has found the following three authors particularly helpful in formulating his thoughts: Sen (On Ethics and Economics), Frankl (Man’s search for ultimate meaning) and Frankfurt (including The Importance of What we Care About and The Reasons of Love).
Centre for Legal Education