Postmodern Professions? The Fragmentation of Legal Education and the Legal Profession
| Author | Andy Boon,John Flood,Julian Webb |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2005.00333.x |
| Published date | 01 September 2005 |
| Date | 01 September 2005 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 32, NUMBER 3, SEPTEMBER 2005
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 473±92
Postmodern Professions? The Fragmentation of Legal
Education and the Legal Profession
Andy Boon,* John Flood,* and Julian Webb*
This article considers the institutional dimensions of professionalism
and the legal profession's struggle with the challenges of post-
modernity. An aspect of this is the Law Society's Training Framework
Review (TFR) which promises changes to solicitors' education from
`cradle to grave'. The first part of the article analyses the structure
and drivers of the TFR, their origins, and how they will be articulated.
Secondly, the TFR is considered in the context of the political economy
of higher education and its role in the new capitalism. Finally, we
examine the potential effects of the TFR for the legal profession in the
context of increasing practice segmentation and the threat of
deprofessionalization, and also for the Law Society itself, whether it
can retain a key role in the life course of the legal profession.
PROLOGUE
Over the last thirty years professions have been subject to searching
critiques; nothing about them is taken for granted anymore. The legal
profession, as one of the trinity of original professions, has been mired in
controversy as critics have deconstructed its values and objectives. Although
for some the criticism has sounded like a jeremiad and they have attempted
to resurrect professions as benign markers of sociality, the agnostics are in
473
ßCardiff University Law School 2005, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road,
Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*School of Law, University of Westminster, 4 Little Titchfield Street, London
W1W 7UW, England
A.Boon@wmin.ac.uk J.A.Flood@wmin.ac.uk J.Webb01@wmin.ac.uk
The authors have varying degrees of closeness with the legal profession and the TFR.
Boon is a member of the Training Framework Review Group (TFRG) and the Bar
Vocational Course Review Group and, with Webb, was a consultant to the Law Society
following their second consultation. Webb was also consultant to the TFRG on work-
based learning. Flood is not associated with the Law Society nor the TFR. We also thank
Avis Whyte for research assistance.
the ascendant.
1
Underpinning the social cohesion of professions with society
is the educational process through which new professionals are initiated. The
critique of professions has enveloped all aspects of professionalization
including education and training, which poses massive challenges to the
approach to knowledge creation taken by professions.
2
In this article we
consider the institutional dimensions of professionalism and the ways that
the legal profession, as a modern institution, grapples with the challenges of
postmodernity.
Postmodern theorists observed that radical changes in socio-economic
organization presented by post-industrial capitalism in the second half of the
twentieth century threatened our prevailing conceptions of knowledge. As
societies became bureaucratized and imbued with notions of controlled
consumption, they fractured the dominant cultural and aesthetic values and
revolutionized the way learning was acquired, classified, made available,
and exploited.
3
For Lyotard, for example, the correlation between the acqui-
sition of knowledge and the training of minds was obsolete.
4
Furthermore, as
Lyotard and Foucault hypothesized, the linkages between power and know-
ledge were fundamental to understanding the processes of modernization.
This is perceived in Foucault's focus on the role of types of knowledge in
supporting the rise of impersonal networks of disciplinary power,
5
and in
Lyotard's view that knowledge is a key component in the competition for
power. As Lyotard also observed, `knowledge and power are two sides of the
same question: who decides what knowledge is and who knows what needs
to be decided?'
6
The relevance to any analysis of the professions is obvious.
The power and legitimacy of professions is acquired in part from their status
as organizations defined by their control over knowledge. If control over
knowledge is lost, what happens to power?
For the solicitors' profession, the Law Society has adopted the role of
determining what is knowledge. The power is constrained, however, as the
initial stage of legal education is negotiated with universities, and the final
474
1 See, for example, R.L. Abel, `The Decline of Professionalism?' (1986) 49 Modern
Law Rev. 1; G. Hanlon, Lawyers, the State and the Market: Professionalism Revisited
(1999); A. Francis, `Out of Touch and Out of Time: Lawyers, Their Leaders and
Collective Mobility within the Legal Profession' (2004) 24 Legal Studies 322. A
minority envisage a positive future: T.C. Halliday, Beyond Monopoly: Lawyers, State
Crises and Professional Empowerment (1987), possibly hinging on change in the
profession's relations with the state. See, for example, A.A. Paterson,
`Professionalism and the Legal Services Market' (1996) 3 International J. of the
Legal Profession 139.
2C.Glasser, `The Legal Profession in the 1990s ± Images of Change' (1990) 10 Legal
Studies 1.
3H.Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (1971), but compare A. Giddens,
The Consequences of Modernity (1990).
4 J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984) 4.
5M.Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979).
6 Lyotard, op. cit. n. 4.
ßCardiff University Law School 2005
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