Roper, C --- "Guest Editorial - On the 20th Anniversary of the Digest" [2012] LegEdDig 17; (2012) 20(2) Legal Education Digest 5

• GUEST EDITORIAL – ON THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DIGEST

---

GUEST EDITORIAL – ON THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DIGEST

The story of the Legal Education Digest began in this way. The Law Foundation of New South Wales had in the late 20th century, as part of its statutory mandate, the support of legal education. For a number of years it responded to requests for funding support from bodies involved in legal education but, over time, it realised that it was doubtful if these various forms of support added up to anything tangible. The Foundation realised that, whilst each project it supported was worthy in itself, there was no overriding policy to guide its support of legal education and it was questionable whether, in fact, legal education was being advanced.

More than that, the Foundation realised that there was almost no data about legal education upon which good policy could be based. For example, were there too many law students; were there too many law schools? To answer those questions, it was necessary to know what law graduates did with their degrees, and whether, in fact, law graduates were having difficulties in finding work in which they could use their degree. But this was not known.

More broadly, whilst there was no shortage of thinking and writing about the law, there was very little literature about legal education as such, particularly in Australia. There was no easy way to know about the small amount of research and thinking about legal education taking place elsewhere in the world, and indeed about what was to be found in the literature.

So thinking and decision-making about legal education were largely taking place without the benefit of what thinking and decision-making should have – empirical evidence and the ideas of others.

This realisation led the Law Foundation to establishing the Centre for Legal Education which had three major objectives – to undertake research about, and related to, legal education; to act as a clearinghouse of information about legal education; and to provide support to other bodies engaged in promoting legal education.

The clearinghouse objective was, from the beginning, largely implemented by regular publication of the Legal Education Digest. The Digest was one of the Centre’s first activities and, as Director, I did the work myself. The first few issues were fairly amateurish affairs, involving the scouring of tables of contents of journals and other publications. All this took place just before the advent of far more efficient and effective search methods now available via the internet. The countries upon which the primary focus was to be found were the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and New Zealand. The Journal of Legal Education in the United States was, of course, a primary source of articles for digesting.

Fortunately, the Digest has continued and is now almost 20 years old. It has been well looked after, with a small number of editors over that time who have maintained its focus on legal education in its various aspects. For a number of years Dr John Nelson guided the Digest and kept its standards high. A major debt is owed to him for its survival and success.

The Digest has brought together, in the one place, an enormous treasure trove of digested writing from many different sources about every imaginable aspect of legal education. It showcases thinking from elsewhere in the world to Australia, and equally showcases to the world the very significant corpus research and writing which has taken place in Australia.

It is fortunate indeed that the Centre for Legal Education has continued, even after its funding was wound up, and that it has seen the ongoing publication of the Legal Education Digest as an activity worth pursuing.

Christopher Roper AM

First Editor of the Legal Education Digest in 1992