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Prior research has shown that while women have entered the legal profession in increasing numbers, the profession continues to privilege the norms, beliefs, and cultural practices of men. However, one aspect of the legal profession that has largely been overlooked, especially in Australia, is legal academia. This oversight is significant as legal academia provides the gateway into the legal profession. Women now make up approximately half of universities’ academic staff, are increasingly completing doctorate qualifications, and are moving into senior positions within academia. On the surface, these changes may suggest that women are now fully integrated into academia and that the academic gender gap has now resolved. We argue, however, that numerical inclusion does not necessarily challenge the male normative structures that underlie legal academia. This article draws on analysis of the biographies of seven hundred legal academics in Australian law schools and investigates differences between male and female legal academics in terms of level of appointment, academic qualifications and professional experience, research productivity, research interests, and mobility. It shows that while the gender gap has closed in some areas, the feminization of legal academia is a myth and female academics continue to face gendered barriers.

Junior legal academics represent the future of teaching and research in law schools, and are vital in shaping the future of the legal profession. However, while research has focused on academic sta...

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Academics are becoming increasingly internationally mobile, and yet there is still limited research into the nature, outcomes and limits of academic mobility. This paper examines the biogra...

Students are increasingly conceived as active learners who collaborate in their own learning rather than being passive recipients of knowledge. This paper provides a qualitative examination of firs...

Indigenous students are under-represented in Australian universities, including in law school, and have lower educational outcomes relative to non-Indigenous students. First, this article identifies systemic barriers that prevent Indigenous students from enrolling in law school, including entrenched educational disadvantage that prevents many Indigenous students from achieving the grades necessary for university entry. Indigenous students who overcome this disadvantage and enrol in law schools then face higher attrition rates relative to non-Indigenous law students. Indigenous students find law schools to be intimidating, unfamiliar and alienating environments. Law schools privilege a narrow Western model of legal education that continues to deny Indigenous understandings of the law. Second, this article identifies potential solutions that may assist in addressing these barriers. These include alternative entry schemes, building pathways between vocational training and universities and engaged outreach programmes for assisting Indigenous students into higher education. Academic, social and financial support is required to address attrition rates; however, solutions need to go deeper than the provision of additional assistance. This article argues for the need to Indigenize legal education, and for the curriculum to consider law as pluralistic and embedded in power relations, and to provide the focus on social justice which motivates many Indigenous students to study law in the first place.

According to the Australian legal profession and media, law schools are producing too many graduates relative to the number of vacancies within the profession. This claim, however, is hardly new. This paper identifies a number of junctions at which there has been concern about the overproduction of law graduates, showing that this discourse appears during periods of major economic stress. It also shows that until the most recent episode of concern, the perception that there are too many law graduates relative to employment opportunities has not been supported by empirical evidence. In the past, the increasing supply of law graduates has been met with increasing demand. However, the legal profession is now facing unprecedented market competition and restructure, and opportunities in the profession for new graduates have declined. This still does not mean that the law schools are producing too many graduates. The current cohort of graduates is likely to continue into a professional occupation, altho...

Lawyers are obliged to act in the interests of their clients, however, it is not clear how lawyers should do this in practice. Should lawyers follow their clients' instructions without deviation, should they actively manage their clients' expectations, or as many studies suggest, do lawyers place their own interests first? This paper examines how lawyers interact with medical malpractice claimants. It reveals that lawyers take a client-aligned approach, where lawyers acknowledge their client's goals, but do not necessarily do what the client says. We argue that this approach is made necessary by legal and organisational constraints which limit the ability of lawyers to produce the types of outcomes that their clients want.

In 2001, the Legal Services Commission (LSC) introduced a new pilot, the Family Advice and Information Network (FAInS), which recognised that family law clients typically face a cluster of legal and non-legal issues. Family lawyers involved in FAInS were encouraged to address a client’s legal problems, and then refer the client to other services for assistance with non-legal issues. In this way, family law clients were to be offered a holistic service, with the lawyer acting as a ‘case manager’ who helped match services to their client’s individual needs. This article presents data drawn from an evaluation of FAInS, and shows that lawyers did not regularly refer their clients to other services, with referrals largely being limited to mediation. We conclude that family lawyers are not necessarily the most appropriate gatekeepers, and propose a number of alternatives for providing a multi-agency approach to resolving family law issues.

Personal Action Plans (PAPs) have been used to encourage client self-management within healthcare services, and are a novel innovation within legal services. This paper examines the use of PAPs by publicly funded family lawyers in England and Wales. It was intended that PAPs were written collaboratively between lawyers and clients in order to assist clients to clarify and resolve issues independently, and aid referrals to other service providers. Whereas self-management initiatives work best when service providers take a client-aligned approach, our research demonstrates that the PAPs were used as a means of managing clients’ expectations. We conclude by suggesting that while PAPs and other forms of self-management tools may work well in healthcare, they have limited potential in the provision of legal services for family law clients.

Law Reform Commissions are permanent bodies which operate in common law countries, and are charged with the task of recommending law reform. The Commissions conduct research into the need for law reform, and it appears this research is guided by a common set of broad principles. A comparison of the ways in which the New Zealand Law Commission and the recently defunct Law Commission of Canada put these principles into practice reveals that different Commissions use different approaches when putting these principles into practice. These different approaches reflect the ways in which the role of law within society and the role of the Law Commissions in shaping the law are conceived. For some Commissions, legal reform is a technical process driven by a desire for increased efficiency and effectiveness. For other Commissions, legal reform is seen as directing, rather than merely reflecting, social and legal norms, and is self-consciously aimed towards achieving the goals of social justice.

This paper draws on interviews with English family lawyers who do publicly funded work, and examines their reasons for entering family law. Generally, lawyers did not deliberately choose to enter family law, and instead explained that they ‘drifted’ into the field. On closer inspection, however, rather than ‘drifting’ into family law, it would appear that the careers of publicly funded family lawyers are strongly constrained by structural and cultural factors. These findings have important implications for attracting and retaining family lawyers.

Since the 1970s the legal profession has become increasingly diversified. However, the inclusion of traditionally excluded social groups has not eradicated inequalities. This paper attempts to explain the contradiction between increasing diversification and persistence of inequalities by examining changes in the structure of the Faculty of Advocates in Scotland. We observe significant changes over the last 40 years, especially the increasing numbers of women entering the Faculty. Yet, women still face discrimination, and their success has largely been at the expense of working-class aspirants. We argue that existing theoretical perspectives, namely feminism and the perspectives of Bourdieu, as well as new insights offered by Beck, are insufficient to account for stratification within the legal profession. We call for a new theoretical perspective which accounts for both social change and persistence of inequalities, and suggest that such an approach is best offered by a feminist reworking of Bourdieu. © 2012 Taylor & Francis.

Academic inbreeding refers to the practice of universities hiring their own graduates. Academic inbreeding has been shown to reduce research productivity, encourage hiring and promotion practices based on social connections rather than transparent, objective and merit-based criteria, and to inhibit innovation by entrenching existing academic culture. Despite the negative effects of inbreeding, there is little empirical research on the problem. This paper investigates the extent and profile of different types of inbreeding among 700 legal academics in 17 Australian law schools. It examines the extent, characteristics and effects of different types of inbred academics, including ‘highly immobile’ academics who have spent their entire careers in the one institution and ‘silver-corded’ academics who return to their alma mater after working elsewhere. We also examine whether inbreeding relates to the status of the university and law school in which an academic is employed, gender, level of appointment, and research productivity. We find that over 40% of Australian legal academics are inbred at some level, and that high levels of inbreeding are more likely to occur in elite law schools and among female and early career academics, although inbreeding does not relate to research productivity.

As law firms and law graduates work in an increasingly globalised environment and often work across multiple jurisdictions, this article outlines the results of a qualitative research project to assess employer perspectives on required graduate knowledge, skills and attributes. There is broad consensus among legal academics and practitioners that law schools need to deliver law programs that take cognisance of global developments and the increasing emphasis on internationalisation. This article addresses the question of how internationalisation is affecting what employers want from Australian law graduates and consequently what those law graduates need from their legal education both to secure jobs and to be as effective as possible as new employees, from the employers’ perspective. The findings presented in the article are based on a qualitative analysis of data gathered through representative employer roundtable discussions. Seven categories emerged, identifying the most important knowledge, skills and attributes required particularly for multi-jurisdictional practice. The findings provide a useful basis for law schools in their review, development and renewal of their law curriculum.