Official URL: https://doi.org/10.5553/TIJRJ.000203

I am a non-lawyer who has never read for a degree in law, but has always studied and lectured in a School of Law, initially at the University of Leeds (UK), where I studied for my undergraduate degree, master’s degree and PhD in criminology, and now at Maynooth University in Ireland. This gives me some sense of legal education, because I always studied alongside law students, and I mostly lecture to mixed groups of law and criminology students. I also taught criminology and criminal justice to lawyers at an advanced level for many years. Where I now teach in Ireland, our legal education is perhaps unconventional. First, most of our law undergraduate students do not exclusively read law. Many instead study a three-year Bachelor of Civil Law: a qualifying law degree with a major or minor in criminology, business, accounting, a language, or another social science or humanity (‘Law and Arts’). Second, people who study ‘straight’ law (the LLB) undertake a four-year course, combining the professionally required subjects with comparative, socio-legal and technologically oriented modules