AS THE BBC triumphantly releases the DVD of its glossy adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, third-year law students at the University of Greenwich will be coming gratefully to the end of the 900-page novel as part of their LLB studies.

Bleak House is scathing in its depiction of the law as an instrument of misery and corruption, as its characters stumble through the legal fog of an endless court case, Jarndyce v Jarndyce. Everybody who comes into contact with the law in Dickens’s world suffers madness, tragedy and ruin, as lawyers relentlessly pursue “the one great principle of English law . . . to make business for itself”. So why make impressionable and — hopefully — idealistic law undergraduates study Dickens’s biting satire on their chosen profession?

The students are studying Bleak House as part of a law through literature course. Such courses are routinely offered by the leading North American law schools, but have only recently begun to become popular in our (more cynical?) universities. Generally, students on such a course look at two different aspects of the subject — law in literature, where students read and critically analyse literary works about the law and lawyers, and law as literature, where students look at legal writing as a piece of literature in its own right. At Greenwich, the focus is on the former, and, apart from Bleak House, we look at texts such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Susan Glaspell’s A Jury of Her Peers.

Reaction to the course, both in and outside academia, has been mixed. Many dismiss it as an airy-fairy exercise that has no relevance in the training of young legal minds. Even the students have taken some convincing. Not unreasonably, given the £25,000 of debt most graduates have at the beginning of their legal career, law students begin university with the very clear goal of attaining a job at the end of their degree. Increasingly, everything that they do during their three years is focused on this end: activities outside the law curriculum — moots, client interviewing competitions, pro bono representation — are all sold on the understanding that participation will enhance a CV. Anything rumoured as not likely to be on an examination paper is carefully avoided, no matter how interesting intellectually it may be. LLB options are selected on their perceived attractiveness to a potential employer. Understandable, perhaps, given the increasing number of law graduates chasing a shrinking number of training contracts or pupillage places.

And yet . . . remember the days when going to university was about more than getting a well paid job at the end of it? The LLB syllabus (and the vocational stage beyond it) seems designed to churn out battery-farmed law students — proficient, certainly, and fit for the purpose, but without any real thoughtfulness to inform that purpose. Providing students with the opportunity to read great literature allows them to think and ask fundamental questions about the role of the law and their role as lawyer. Atticus Finch, the father and lawyer in To Kill A Mockingbird, epitomises the lawyer we should perhaps all aspire to become — reminding us and our students that being a lawyer should be about decency, integrity and humanity rather than just money and status.

Written advocacy is an essential tool for any lawyer, yet each year students come to university with ever weaker written skills. A-level courses increasingly spoon-feed students with notes and abbreviated texts. Reading great literature teaches people about the power of words to convince and persuade. On the course we look at passages from literature and sometimes from legal writing and try to discover how the piece of writing works — looking at the structure, the choice of words and the effect on the reader. It shows students that legal writing need not be incomprehensible or even just dull.

Education, according to W. B.Yeats, is not about the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. If we can encourage our students to look at the bigger picture — to think about justice and morality and social inequality, if we can ignite a desire to be the best lawyer that we can be, then surely we have succeeded in our aim as educators.

The author is senior lecturer in law at the University of Greenwich

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