ABSTRACT

This article provides a critique of The Fairness Project, a learning and teaching project on equality and diversity in the legal profession and its impact on employability, delivered over three years across three university law schools. The Fairness Project builds on current literature on lack of equality and diversity in the legal profession, by adopting a student perspective. Barriers to entry and progression within the legal profession occur because of a range of issues including social class, gender, ethnicity, initial education, university education and gaining work experience in a law firm. We explore whether, and to what extent, we can educate law students from a range of diverse backgrounds and social identities about the “diversity barriers” entrenched in the legal profession, and thus influence their own career trajectories to access the profession. Our results show that – at least to some extent – we can. The data suggests that The Fairness Project helped prepare law students to tackle the inequalities that exist in the legal profession. The learning benefits of The Fairness Project are transferable to other law schools and could be adapted for use with law students in other jurisdictions, or for students in other disciplines where “diversity barriers” may exist.

摘要

本文对公平项目提出了批评，这是一个关于法律职业中的平等和多样性及其对就业能力的影响的学习和教学项目，在三所大学法学院进行了三年多的时间。公平项目通过采用学生的视角，以当前关于法律职业缺乏平等和多样性的文献为基础。由于社会阶层、性别、种族、初始教育、大学教育和在律师事务所获得工作经验等一系列问题，法律专业的进入和进步会出现障碍。我们探索是否可以，以及在多大程度上，我们可以教育来自不同背景和社会身份的法律专业学生了解法律职业中根深蒂固的“多样性障碍”，从而影响他们进入该行业的职业轨迹。我们的结果表明——至少在某种程度上——我们可以。数据表明，公平项目帮助法学院学生准备好解决法律职业中存在的不平等问题。The Fairness Project的学习优势可转移到其他法学院，并可适用于其他司法管辖区的法学院学生，或可能存在“多样性障碍”的其他学科的学生。