Records of Legal Education Project

The Records of Legal Education Project (RLEP), funded by the Leverhulme Trust, ran from October 1994 to May 1998. It was based at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS), and its brief was to: investigate records of legal education housed in selected institutions, primarily in the Greater London area, and report on their availability, accessibility and significance; create a Guide to Records of Legal Education and Law Schools to enable researchers to trace the location of documents of relevance; publish and disseminate its findings to assist researchers in law, the humanities and the social sciences; exceptionally, collect, maintain and make available for research records of legal education where the creating/controlling agency was unable to make any alternative archival provision. This material was placed in a Records of Legal Education Archives located in the IALS Library. Research was concentrated on institutions and records in the Greater London area, since this is a) where the highest proportion of legal education material was to be found; b) where the project was physically located. The project's resources were too limited to go further afield. The project was co-ordinated by Clare Cowling, an Archivist employed on a part-time basis, under the direction of an Advisory Committee comprising Jules Winterton, the IALS Librarian, Avrom Sherr, Woolf Professor of Legal Education at IALS, David Sugarman, Professor of Law at the University of Lancaster and William Twining, Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London until 1998. The Project was based in the IALS Library and was granted use of its facilities.