This paper is a revised version of a plenary lecture delivered at the SLS Annual Conference held at Oxford Brookes University in June 2023. It adopts an auto-ethnographic approach, drawing on the author's long experience of participating in the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), to assess the current state of legal research in the UK and consider the implications of the increasing importance in the research landscape of engaging in research that serves the public good. The paper explores what falls within the scope of ‘legal research’, particularly for REF purposes, and reflects on how REF-focused research sits within the broader scope of legal scholarly activities. Ideas of the public good are examined and their relation to measures of research impact probed. The paper concludes by painting a broad-brush picture of the current research landscape, identifying key elements and engines of change, and speculating on the direction in which things are going and what should most concern legal scholars going forward. Although primarily focused on legal research in the UK, the paper should be of interest to legal scholars beyond the UK, particularly those in jurisdictions where research assessment exercises are a feature of academic life.

This is an introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Contextual Legal Pedagogy’. It introduces the themes of the Special Issue and offers summaries of the papers in the collection. The introduction considers whether, and how, contextual legal pedagogy can still be radical, and how addressing pedagogical issues also necessarily involves addressing vital theoretical issues.

As the concept of a ‘practice-ready’ attorney continues to grow in both law firms and law schools, law school libraries are meeting this need by offering programming related to legal technology. In this article, a law librarian from the United States, Janet Kearney, discusses their successes and failures in creating and maintaining legal technology programming, a first step in a larger conversation on practice-ready law graduates. The article is based on a June 2021 presentation given at the annual conference of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians.

This paper explores law school portraits of women in law as a way to challenge the over-representation of men in law. Portraiture is a long-standing means by which professions celebrate worthy individuals and reproduce institutional values. In relation to law and the legal professions, portraits are predominantly of men and link law with masculine attributes, contributing to the visual and actual marginalisation of women in law's past and present. The paper begins by setting out why portraits of women exhibited in UK law schools are an important way to challenge gender inequalities in law. It then provides a snapshot of the gender dimensions of university and law school portraiture in the UK, before analysing the Inspirational Women of the Law exhibition at Newcastle Law School as a method of disrupting the dominant gendered visual order in law, and bringing into focus women in legal history.

The aim of this article, written by Martin Vorberg, is to portray the approach to information logistics at a private law school in Hamburg, Germany which is a largely self-sufficient, coordinated library system, with occasional use of local libraries and supra-regional delivery services. The article describes the management of a main library and more than twenty branch libraries in the context of some challenging times and in relation to hybrid collections and the uses of electronic media.

William & Mary, chartered in 1693 by King William III and Queen Mary II, is the second oldest college in America. When George Wythe was appointed Professor of Law and Policy in 1779, the College opened the first American law school. This article, written by Jim Heller, traces the development of the law school and its library in four stages. The Founding Stage, from 1779 until the commencement of the Civil War in 1861, shows gradual growth for the young law program. The Stage of Decline lasted from the closing of the College in 1861 to the reinstitution of the study of law at the College in the early 1920's. The fifty-year Struggling Revival Era runs from the early 1920's through to the 1970s. The Modern Era, from 1980 to the present, shows maturation and growth of the law school and the law library.

The Bodleian Law Library has only existed as an entity in its own right for less than 50 years. Yet part of the collection dates back to the days before the founding of the Bodleian Library in 1602. The rise and fall in fortunes of the teaching of law at Oxford is closely tied to the establishment of the law library. A lesser known aspect of the history includes the ties between Oxford and the United States, especially its oldest law school, William and Mary Law School. In this paper, Ruth Bird offers a brief history of the University of Oxford and then looks at the history of law teaching, before moving on to the evolution of the Law Library itself, and some links with our cousins across the pond.

Liz Polding writes about her experiences of integrating e-learning resources into existing law courses at the Oxford Institute of Legal Practice, and shares her experiences of how to ensure that their introduction and use is accepted by tutors who may not have much relevant experience. Resources used include open source options, such as Moodle, webcams, pod casts, interactive noticeboards, chatrooms and e-portfolios.

This paper by Nicola Wakefield was presented at the BIALL 2006 Conference in Brighton. The presentation discussed the formation of a working partnership between the School of Law Staff and the Law Library at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). The two parties have worked together successfully for many years to embed legal information skills training into all law teaching programmes. The paper looks at how collaboration occurred, what training materials have been developed, working methods, and the reasons for the project's success.