Legal education and social justice: an obvious link?

This paper aims to explore the role social justice plays in legal education and in law schools more generally. It begins by challenging the notion that legal education by definition contributes to social justice and that Law Schools are places with social justice at their core. In doing so the paper explores different conceptualisations of social justice and of the purpose of legal education and makes an argument for a form of social justice which is about the opportunities law schools offer for those who study and work within them or aspire to do so, for the experience they have while there and for the outcomes that they achieve as well as the wider societal impact law schools and their graduates might have. While the first part of the paper is a theoretical exploration which seeks to think about the opportunities and challenges presented by linking legal education to social justice, the second part of the paper then focuses on 2 projects which grapple with those theoretical ideas in a more practical context.