Brexit and the Law School: from vacillating between despair and hope to building responsibility and community

Abstract

EDITORIALBrexit and the Law School: from vacillating between despair and hope to building responsibility and community Putting together this special issue of The Law Teacher, and writing this editorial, has been an intense and in some ways enjoyable experience, but also a highly emotional and personally resonant one. Working on Brexit and the Law School has meant reflecting on our past experiences, present lives and future plans. We want to be transparent about our own positions, because they obviously influence our knowledge and understanding, the agendas we set and research questions we ask, 1 including those that informed the discussions in the workshops that preceded this special issue 2 and the papers within it. Hence, we begin this editorial by writing about ourselves and our experiences of UK law schools, before turning to the stories that we believe that this project on Brexit and the Law School is telling.We are both mid-career women working in Northern English law schools: pre-1992, civic institutions with global perspectives and ambitions. Those law schools are roughly similar in terms of staff and student numbers. Sheffield has a high proportion of undergraduate students from the "Northern corridor" from Liverpool to Hull. Leeds also draws large numbers from this area, but has perhaps more from the Midlands, London and the South, and more overseas undergraduate students. Sheffield sends roughly a third of its undergraduate students on a year abroad, many to Europe under the Erasmus+ scheme. 3 Leeds sends fewer (over 10% every year) with more going to destinations outside the EU. Both schools have LLM programmes that recruit predominantly non-EU overseas students, and not much EU law is taught within those programmes. Both of us have experience of leadership of and/or within those law schools (in Hervey's case also within others in the North of England and Midlands), and are thus particularly conscious of the make-up and aspirations of our student bodies. We also both have experience as external examiners, through periodic review or other quality assurance processes, and as "Research Excellence Framework (REF) critical friend", of a number of other UK-based law schools, including in the south of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and in both the pre-and post-1992 sector. We have research collaborations with people in law schools across the UK, and beyond.

Bringing EU law back down to Earth

“…And the departure from the EU has created a discipline's worth of law in itself – through new international agreements, new UK primary law and a positive cascade of new secondary legislation – not to mention the litigation to which all of these (have already started to) 4 give rise. As Wallace and Hervey put it, Brexit offers ‘a chance to regroup and rethink, to re-justify what we are doing when teaching and researching EU law, how we are doing it, and why’ (Wallace and Hervey, 2019, p. 226).…”