A change in outfit? Conceptualising legal skills in the contemporary law school

This chapter will draw on Stuart Toddington’s paper within Birks’ collection focusing on the question ‘what is an authentic legal skill?’. It will use the paper as a starting point to discuss how legal skills are currently characterised and used within legal education, considering the way in which the wider shift away from transmissional knowledge and towards skills and employability within higher education has manifested itself within law schools. In doing so, it will support Toddington’s argument that the notion of an authentic legal skill should not be defined by either the legal profession, or the employability agenda more widely. Instead, it explores how Toddington’s conception of the normative ideal of the legal enterprise is compatible with forms of liberal legal education which eschew such focuses. The chapter will then move on to consider how an authentic legal skill should be defined to achieve such a normative idea, suggesting that that there is a need to broaden Toddington’s original conception and include more general academic skills, as applied within the discipline of law. In addition, it will argue that both digital skills and skills involving emotions require incorporating into contemporary definitions of authentic legal skills to achieve the normative legal ideal that Toddington proposed.