Is Legal Education Over-Regulated or Under-Regulated?

Abstract

Posing the challenges facing legal education as concerned with its under- or over-regulation is the wrong question. Instead, we need to cast fresh eyes on the question of legal education beyond the binary of over- and under-regulation. This paper identifies three inter-related factors that reveal the inadequacy of our long-standing discourse on regulation of Australian legal education: the misapprehension as to the source of the qualifying (regulated) law curriculum; the profession’s own inability to articulate ‘work-readiness’ as a feature of legal education; and the university as a legacy institution.

Keywords: legal education, professional regulation, higher education, graduate employability