Good practice and the UK LLB degree or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the 21st century

Law schools have - unlike for example the arts or humanities - been resistant to change when it comes to progressive student pedagogies, preferring to hold on to traditional models of teaching and learning. This paper looks at what is considered to be good practice in the current higher education landscape broadly, and then develops what it considers to be good practice for law schools specifically. This law-specific definition of good practice encompasses both active as well as reflective learning that can be facilitated by means of a blended classroom. Whilst traditional pedagogies remain prevalent in law schools generally, this paper questions whether a teaching-intensive modern UK higher education institution like Abertay University is able to break the mould. To this end the paper explores to what extent this definition of good practice is reflected within Abertay University’s law school using as a case study the Public Law module of 2017/2018. It concludes by finding that, contrary to popular belief, there is much that ancient institutions can learn from modern establishments when it comes to the student experience.