Against authentic assessment in English and Welsh law schools

Abstract Authentic assessment, where assessment closely replicates ‘real world’ employment tasks, has been warmly received across higher education. Its lure for English and Welsh law schools seems almost irresistible, particularly considering the increasing emphasis on lucrative employability in a marketised sector, new forms of qualification for solicitors and novel routes into law compounding the pressure on law schools to remain competitive. However, I argue that resist it we should. Reviewing existing critiques, I draw on the work of Derrida to take a deconstructionist perspective, which probes the construction of meaning through language. Deconstruction reveals that the term ‘authentic’ is highly problematic, working semantically to create a category of ‘inauthentic’, which is immediately valorised as a binary hierarchy. In the current context of the knowledge-economy, the ‘authentic’ becomes conflated with the world of the legal profession, simultaneously rendering critical academic and theoretical legal work as the devalued and inauthentic ‘other’. I argue that the reification of the lawyerly as the sphere of the ‘real’ that results from the authentic/inauthentic dyad exacerbates the current schism between approaches to legal education as being either vocational or liberal, threatening the intellectual integrity of a law degree as requiring the pursuit of legal knowledge as a good in its own right as opposed to what is of current (i.e. mercantile) value. As such, rather than arguing for an expansion or a more nuanced reading of the term as per existing critiques, I argue for its abandonment altogether, considering it a deeply flawed and damaging term.