What is it?
Now I don’t propose to definitively say once and for all what law is or isn’t in my book. Clever, or at least more determined, people have gone over this before me and I will be using some of their work for sure.
But I will consider what people think the law means, both in the law school and in the wider communities with whom they engage. I think it’s very important, if somewhat matter, when thinking about the public understanding of law to think about well what do they understand that law to be?
Before the law school can develop interventions or collaborations to develop accurate understanding of what the law is, or more critical reflections of what the law could be, it needs to address what they and the public think the law is.
If when talking about the law what you really mean is legal services, you’re likely to head towards interventions which assist people in understanding and working with those services. Law clinics would be a very good example here. People are thinking about the law as services which they might receive from legal professionals, and a legal system in which they require advice and potentially representation. The law is something which they must deal with in a particular moment and particular context. This is the just in time aspect of helping people work with and understand the law.
In talking about the law you might be thinking about legal services quite narrowly. You might be thinking about how legal services are delivered, about the regulation and structure of legal services and legal professionals. And this might point towards a more just in case kind of intervention common public legal education helping people understand how legal advice is structured, how legal professionals are trained and regulated and so on.
Or you might when talking about the law be talking about the work of a legislature. You are thinking about how statutes other forms of legal instrument come to be. And again this points potentially try more just in case public legal education focused kind of work, connecting perhaps with broader citizenship of civics kind of education.
And perhaps you’re thinking about law as a system as a set of rules, reflecting a particular political and historical context. Through public legal education with a critical and reflective element, you work with the public to understand the situated and contingent nature of the law in all its various manifestations.
Because of course none of the things we’ve discussed is the law in total, the law is made-up of all of these things. And at the root of each of these things is an experience of the law, an encounter with the law, in one of these aspects. It’s just that some of these aspects are more obvious to people, they happen to people more perhaps. People are more aware of for example courts and legal advice than they are of the processes of legal creation, or of the historic and political context in which law is created.
So when thinking about what interventions can be done, what collaborations and partnerships can work, it is important to think about what do people need and want from the law school in relation to their experience of and understanding of the law. It is important, as several colleagues have said to me when I’ve been talking to them about the book, to start with the public situation with the law as much as with the law schools expertise and knowledge.
And that requires the law school itself to reflect on what does it understand by law and how is this reflected in its teaching. And they can take from engagement the public understanding of what the law is incorporate that into its own understanding developing a better appreciation of how the law is experienced by people as a set of services, as a set of systems, and as a set of situated and contingent people, places, and rules.
Public understanding of law 