The Fairness Project: the role of legal educators as catalysts for change. Engaging in difficult dialogues on the impact of diversity barriers to entry and progression in the legal profession

McKee, Tina, Nir, Rachel Anne, Alexander, Jill, Griffiths, Elisabeth, Dargue, Paul and Hervey, Tamara (2021) The Fairness Project: the role of legal educators as catalysts for change. Engaging in difficult dialogues on the impact of diversity barriers to entry and progression in the legal profession. The Law Teacher, 55 (3). pp. 283-313. ISSN 0306-9400

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/03069400.2020.1796061

Abstract

This article provides a critique of The Fairness Project, a learning and teaching project on equality and diversity in the legal profession and its impact on employability, delivered over three years across three university law schools. The Fairness Project builds on current literature on lack of equality and diversity in the legal profession, by adopting a student perspective. Barriers to entry and progression within the legal profession occur because of a range of issues including social class, gender, ethnicity, initial education, university education and gaining work experience in a law firm. We explore whether, and to what extent, we can educate law students from a range of diverse backgrounds and social identities about the ‘diversity barriers’ entrenched in the legal profession, and thus influence their own career trajectories to access the profession. Our results show that – at least to some extent – we can. The data suggests that The Fairness Project helped prepare law students to tackle the inequalities that exist in the legal profession. The learning benefits of The Fairness Project are transferable to other law schools and could be adapted for use with law students in other jurisdictions, or for students in other disciplines where ‘diversity barriers’ may exist.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: Funding Information: We are grateful for the support of the University of Central Lancashire School of Law and Social Science, University of Northumbria Law School and University of Sheffield Law School (especially Robert Burrell) and for the excellent research assistance provided by Rachel Allsopp at Northumbria Law School. We would like to thank the journal editors and anonymous reviewers for their “tough love” comments. We are also very grateful for the insights of the many students with whom we have shared this project and for the comments and suggestions made at the HEA Annual Conference, Manchester, 2017, the Society of Legal Scholars Annual Conference, Dublin, 2017 and the IJCLE Annual Conference, Monash University, Melbourne, 2018.
Uncontrolled Keywords: Equality and diversity, employability, legal education, legal profession
Subjects: M100 Law by area
M200 Law by Topic
M900 Other in Law
Department: Faculties > Business and Law > Northumbria Law School
Depositing User: Rachel Branson
Date Deposited: 30 Sep 2020 11:07
Last Modified: 13 Jan 2022 03:30
URI: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/44354

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