Coventry University Law School

The fact that England was dumped out of the Euro 16 football tournament has naturally brought to mind 1966 and England winning the World Cup. In that year the then House of Lords issued its Practice Direction, allowing it to overrule its previous decisions and the government agreed to allow individuals to petition the European Court of Human Rights. The House of Lords is now the Supreme Court and the present government is considering repealing the Human Rights Act 1998 so that European human rights law will have less impact on our law.  

Here in Coventry, Coventry Law School will be celebrating its own unique contribution to legal education. In that year the then head of the department of business and legal studies, Dr W.F. Frank, at the then Lanchester College of Technology led his small—by current standards—law team in developing and successfully delivering the first business law degree in the country. The staff included Dr Frank, Bruce Renton and David Royall; the latter becoming head of law in 1976 after Dr Frank’s death.

Like other similar institutions, Lanchester had been teaching for the much respected University of London External LL.B, but by the mid 1960’s the government of the day had a vision both to convert non-University higher education institutions into Polytechnics and also to enable them to teach degrees to be validated and awarded by a new body to be called the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA). By June 1966 the CNAA had approved the first business law degree in the country to be delivered and awarded at Lanchester.  Students arrived in September of that year to join this novel course, which offered students the opportunity to study business and business law subjects as well as core legal areas. In 1969, 18 of that cohort graduated at Coventry Cathedral; tellingly only one of those graduating was female, and most had studied at Grammar School. One of those students was Paul Marsh, who later became president of the law society.

Very soon Lanchester College of Technology became Lanchester Polytechnic, and by 1992 had become Coventry University, with statutory powers to award its own degrees.

But why a business law degree? Well, Dr Frank seems to have had a view that law degree courses were by and large very traditional, following broadly similar patterns with similar law subjects being taught. The Coventry degree offered the opportunity to study company law, employment law and local government law and non-law subjects such as accountancy, economics and business administration were a compulsory element of the course. Most of those courses were well established, although some were not that long in the tooth, for example the University of Nottingham did not start teaching law until the mid-1950’s, with the University of Leicester not offering law until 1966. Yet other University law courses (eg York, Bradford) are even newer than that. Polytechnics were also expected to deliver something distinctive. Such distinction could be seen in the German system, where, especially in relation to, say, company law, this could be delivered  in the wider context of business, with its perhaps greater need for  contract law, commercial law, and of course company law, and all without the need to teach Roman law!

Today at Coventry University we still offer a Business Law degree in addition to a “straight LLB”, allowing students to study commercial law, company law, intellectual property (a subject first brought to Coventry in the 1980’s by Chris Poole) and employment law. The school also offers LLM courses in international business law and oil, gas and energy law, maintaining its business law tradition. From those small beginnings, Coventry University is now ranked 15th in the national league tables and the law school admits over 300 students on to three undergraduate law programmes and LLM courses—many from the EU and all over the globe. This is a far cry from that first cohort of law students in terms of numbers, national origin, ethnicity and sex—over half of our students are female and we attract students from various backgrounds. 

Our celebrations have already begun, but we hope to see as many of our ex-staff and students at our commemorative event—on 1 October.

Dr Steve Foster, head of the school of law & Keith Gompertz, senior lecturer in law, Coventry University Law School (aa5961@coventry.ac.uk)