Here’s a couple of excerpts from the current drafts…
“The law school offers two useful ways to frame discussions around the role of the university and public engagement. Firstly, the tensions and debates in the law school around its role and purpose reflect those of the wider university, the tension between vocational and liberal approaches to the purpose of higher education.
The nature of law as both a body of knowledge and as a practice provides a lens for considering the role of knowledge and practice in the university, the aims of sharing knowledge ‘as it is’ and the critique of such knowledge and practice, and the role of the university in creating and critiquing such bodies of knowledge and practice.
Secondly, the role of the law in society makes the law school an ‘obvious’ candidate for public engagement. In all jurisdictions people need to know what the law is and how it works in order to make effective use of it, for positive and negative reasons; it also helps people participate in politics if they understand the processes of law making and how policy connects to it.
Using the law school in this way, the book is ‘thinking with’ the law school to understand the wider issues of public engagement, as it then moves to ‘think about’ the law school as an example of these issues and the importance of considering ‘local’ issues of history and discipline context.
Alongside its role in thinking from the law school to public engagement, considering the role and works of public engagement also offers a way to think into the law school. As the law school works with and for wider communities it will work with a range of ideas, experiences, and understandings relating to the law. These offer forms of epistemological insight and open up the law school curriculum and research to alternative ways of understanding the law, allowing for change in teaching and research.
Through these developments, public engagement can form part of efforts at decolonising the law school by problematising its curriculum and research and providing a way to think from and with (and not just thinking about) other forms of legal knowledge, experience, and possibility .
Thinking from / with communities is an aspect of ‘learning from’ alongside ‘learning about ’ practices and communities. It can also be linked with the ‘just in case’ aspect of public legal education, in which people learn about law because it may be useful and such learning has value in its own right, contrasted with the ‘just in time’ feature of law clinics, where the law school is responding to immediate need.
These ways of thinking from / with / about / to reflect the nature of public engagement as a two-way process in which publics and the university learn about and from each other, developing just in case knowledge and capabilities, even as they may benefit from just in time services and resources.
“Thinking about universities and their context, the aims and roles of universities, invites us to think about the university as a whole and how we might understand the way in which all of these things come together.
We can look at the university in terms of three connected ideas. There is the university as a system. When we focus on the law school we will be thinking about its curriculum, its research, and how these are structured and delivered. We are thinking about the ways in which decisions are made, how resources are allocated. We’re thinking about what the law school might look like if we were to put it down on paper as a set of diagrams and policies.
And this system in some way expresses a set of ideas. There are ideas and values about what this paper university or law school should look like and how it should work, and then there’s the reality of how those ideas and values play out against some of the constraints of the broader system which inherits policy areas and ideas from wider values outside the university.
Finally there are the choices to be made, and there are the possibilities within which the university and law school work. And the system and idea elements reflect the interplay of different values, different contexts, different policies which create this sense of the choices that the university can make.
These three elements interact, they are considered separately as each bit enables us to think about important parts university, where we remember that they inform one another-they shape and are shaped by one another. At any given time the system will appear to be the most obvious part of the university, it is the thing that we can see and it is the thing which exerts great influence.
But over time as new ideas emerge and interact and shape the system, as new choices evolve and are made and reflect ideas and change the system, so there is a process both of maintenance and change. And when we think about any aspect of the university, for example engagement in this book, we think about how that particular thing emerges from the interactions of systems, ideas, and choices.
And as we continue thinking about the systems ideas and choices of the law school, an important aspect of engagement is where it fits within the law school. How does it relate to teaching and research for example? Is engagement something separate from those two roles, a specialist activity carried out perhaps by specialists for its own sake? Is it a mission of its own?
Or can engagement be part of teaching and research, connecting with them more closely than it does where engagement is carried out purely as a mission of its own? Is there a way for engagement to be integrated with teaching and research, or to inform how these things are carried out?”
Public understanding of law 