Article Analysis

Article Analysis

Article Analysis

Introduction

This paper presents analysis of an article, titled, ““Does legal education have undermining effects on law students? Evaluating changes in motivation, values, and well-being”. This article is written by a team of two writers, namely K. M. Sheldon and L. S. Krieger. The authors have focused on the study of prevalence of motivation and subjective well-being among the students enrolled in legal education. The authors have used quantitative research method with purposive sampling. The sample contains law students.

The authors (Sheldon, Krieger, 2004) hold the point of view that Legal education internationally has tended to be an elite education, but law schools have not been immune from the wider social and demographic changes affecting higher education more generally, particularly across the developed world. This transformation of legal education consists of three related demographic trends: access, diversity, and scale.

Analysis of the Article

According to Sheldon and Kreiger “In university systems that emphasize the liberal tradition, law is taught primarily in law faculties as an academic discipline in its own right. Nevertheless, the law degree may also contain other arts and social science subjects that broaden the educational experience” (Sheldon, Krieger, 2004). The preparation for legal practice remains for a later period of either formal or, less commonly today, apprenticeship-style professional training.

The law schools have also increased recruiting from social groups with a limited history of participation in higher education. This has had a substantial impact on diversity in some of these jurisdictions. In the UK, most established ethnic minorities are now proportionately overrepresented at law school, with the exception of Afro-Caribbean students. The (numerical) feminization of legal education is also an increasingly global trend, with women composing almost, or more than, 50 percent of the intake in many jurisdictions.

According to the findings presented by the authors, massification, of course, has had a more general impact on the scale of legal education (Sheldon, Krieger, 2004). In England and Wales, for example, the numbers of law students admitted to LLB programs increased from 1,778 in 1970 to 6,659 by 1994, to 9,248 in 2001. Most of that greater than fivefold increase occurred in the 1990s. For most civil law countries (at least in Europe), this has been, relatively, less of an issue—access to law school has been open in many systems since the late 1960s, or even earlier, resulting in very high university enrollments. In France, for example, by the ...