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 following pages .
Finally, a plenary session opened
with Keynote Speeches on the subject of Benchmarking from John
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/>
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