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Legal Education, Social Mobility, and Employability: Possible Selves, Curriculum Intervention, and the Role of Legal Work Experience
Author(s) -
Francis Andrew
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of law and society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.263
H-Index - 48
eISSN - 1467-6478
pISSN - 0263-323X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6478.2015.00704.x
Subject(s) - employability , curriculum , context (archaeology) , sociology , legal education , structuring , situated , intervention (counseling) , work (physics) , engineering ethics , pedagogy , public relations , political science , law , psychology , engineering , mechanical engineering , psychiatry , paleontology , artificial intelligence , computer science , biology
This article interrogates a number of assumptions underpinning the recent focus on employability and social mobility within legal education and the legal profession – in particular the capacity of legal work experience to support these policy objectives. It draws on research evidence to argue that a narrow focus upon the individual acquisition of skills and attributes fails to capture the fuller complexity of legal employability as a negotiated, situated process. It shows how the structuring properties of the field reduce the capacity of employability initiatives to disrupt the patterns of social and cultural reproduction that frame access to the legal profession. In this context, the potential of curriculum intervention to enhance employability is inhibited by the structural constraints upon the possible selves that law students are able to imagine. It suggests that students’ opportunities are not only shaped by their past, but are also constrained by their possible futures.