BACL’s 75th Anniversary Workshop took place at King’s College, Cambridge, on 7-8 July 2025. It was an inspiring celebration of the continuing relevance of comparative law in UK legal education. We are deeply grateful to the 30 legal academics and research students who contributed their insight and enthusiasm.
The workshop featured 19 speakers including Early Career Researchers, who discussed the methodology, substance and teaching of comparative law. Participants represented a diverse range of topics, institutions, seniority levels and genders. The final roundtable session offered a candid reflection on the challenges facing comparative law teaching and research in the UK post-Brexit, and on the findings of BACL’s 2024–2025 national survey, which were also presented. We are pleased that the conversation continues through a series of blog posts based on the workshop’s presentations and discussions.
COMPARATIVE LAW DOCTORATES TODAY
The PhD was invented in the early twentieth century. In Law, the PhD was rarely taken by UK-educated students until the 1980s. At BACL’S 75th workshop in July 2025, Paula Giliker and I shared experiences of being the only British-educated doctorate students in our years at Oxford and Cambridge in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Where foreign students took the PhD, they were mainly studying international law or comparative law. Although the doctorate has now become typically a requirement for appointment to a research-active teaching post in a UK Law School, the numbers of UK-educated students is still small. As a result, Law Schools have to consider carefully which kinds of doctoral project they can support or examine.
The traditional issues were about the ability of the institution to find supervisors and examiners and to provide the student with access to necessary resources. In many ways, the problems of resources have diminished with the internet in the last fifteen years. Electronically available resources enable a student to access their national resources even from abroad. No longer is it necessary that the degree-awarding institution itself has adequate library resources of its own. But the problem of supervisors has changed. On a traditional model, the supervisor knew both the institution’s local legal system and system that the student was comparing with it and was able to guide and check research in both. That guaranteed the quality of the work, as well as offered guarantees against plagiarism. The challenges here are now significant.
First, are students able to read legal materials in the original language and thereby lay claim to being experts on a significant part of that other system? Does it matter that the foreign language element is only tangential to the project? Translation tools and AI provide students with ways to translate foreign texts. But how can the student or the supervisor be sure of the accuracy both of the translation and, more importantly, of the understanding of how the text fits into the legal system as a whole. For example, in studying remedies in judicial review in English law, I have found some French students to be accurate in their translation of textbooks and cases, but to miss the significance of declaration as a remedy, not least where there is no need for a prior administrative decision and no order for execution of the decision follows. Accuracy of translation is not enough – the supervisor needs to be able to check that there is accurate understanding of how the legal system in question works. Clearly, where translation is merely a small part of a project, then ability to read a particular language is not crucial to claims to originality in research. But where a doctoral project turns on an in-depth study of a branch of another leal system, then inability to read the relevant materials in the original language is more problematic.
Perhaps we need to be clearer on the claims made by a doctoral student. The QAA (2020) merely requires the student ‘to demonstrate an original contribution to knowledge in their subject, field or profession, through original research or the original application of existing knowledge or understanding’. That can be done without reading languages, though the aspect of ‘original research’ needs reinterpreting. The originality of a doctoral student might be in understanding the context of cases or legislation and applying theory to them. The usual test the student has to pass at the viva is not just to show that the work is accurate and genuinely their own, but also that the student understands the relevant context of law and theory of the thesis topic.
Secondly, the institution has to be sure that a supervisor can be found who is an expert. As Michele Graziadei pointed out in the workshop, one way of ensuring this now is the appointment of an external supervisor who can supervise by Zoom rather in person. But, of course, the individual in question has to be linked in a contractual way with the degree-awarding institution to ensure accountability. This kind of solution would provide some quality assurance to the institution. The institution would also have to find examiners capable of assessing the quality of the thesis.
All the same, these points raise the question of what exactly the UK institution is offering if not the resources and not the main supervisor. If the resources and the supervisor need not be in the UK institution what is the point of being there? Is our contribution in providing guidance on method, rather than on foreign content? Key issues are how to frame a viable question for research, how to research English law with foreign eyes, and how to draw conclusions in a meaningful way. In addition, we provide a research environment where the kinds of question about theory which Geoffrey Samuel raised at the workshop are debated. The UK institutions need to be clearer what we offer to those coming from outside to undertake either comparative law research or research on foreign legal systems.
Posted by John Bell, Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Cambridge.
British Association of Comparative Law 