1999 LILI Conference: Challenge and Change in Law Teaching

Reviewed by
Tracey Varnava and Sandy Fury
National Centre for Legal Education
ncle@warwick.ac.uk

January this year saw the Inaugural Conference of the Learning In Law Initiative (LILI) take place at the University of Warwick. Delegates came from over 40 different universities, 12 FE colleges and a dozen other institutions, and there were representatives from the Law Society, the Institute of Legal Executives and the Society for Research into Higher Education. All in all, with 121 people registered, it was an excellent turnout for the first major event run by the NCLE.

The day began with an opening talk by Roger Burridge, Director of the NCLE, who spoke about the current issues of concern to law teachers. He outlined some of the pressures and problems we all face, but balanced this with the positive developments being made and the opportunities available to take forward the subject of legal education.

The bulk of the programme was made up of parallel workshop sessions addressing the specific themes of Managing Change, Assessment, Curriculum Design and Development, Benchmarking and various Teaching and Learning Approaches. Papers were offered by colleagues from universities in England, Scotland and overseas, Higher Education Institutions and the private sector many of these are available for you to download in PDF format from the followingpages.

Finally, a plenary session opened with Keynote Speeches on the subject of Benchmarking fromJohn Randall, Chief Executive of the Quality Assurance Agency, and Professor Lewis Elton, of the Higher Education Research and Development Unit at University College London. The contrasting approaches of these two very knowledgeable and forthright speakers was highly enjoyable and provoked a lively question and answer session. This stimulating debate was far from resolved by the time the conference was drawn to a close.

We hope that the conference was seen by participants as an opportunity to speak to like-minded colleagues in law teaching and to gain not only a great deal of encouragement but also some real, practical ideas on enriching their teaching and learning. We believe it also helped establish LILI as an organisation for and of law teachers, and that it paved the way for many more such gatherings.

This is a Conference Report published on 26 February 1999.

Citation: Varnava T et al, '1999 LILI Conference: Challenge and Change in Law Teaching', Conference Report,1999 (1)The Journal of Information, Law and Technology (JILT).<http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/99-1/varnava.html>. New citation as at 1/1/04: <http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/elj/jilt/1999_1/varnava/>