Against Authentic Assessment in English and Welsh Law Schools

Chatterjee, Bela Bonita (2025) Against Authentic Assessment in English and Welsh Law Schools. Higher Education. ISSN 0018-1560

Abstract

Authentic assessment, where assessment closely replicates ‘real world’ employmenttasks, has been warmly received across higher education. Its lure for English and Welshlaw schools seems almost irresistible, particularly considering the increasing emphasison lucrative employability in a marketised sector, new forms of qualification for solici-tors and novel routes into law compounding the pressure on law schools to remain com-petitive. However, I argue that resist it we should. Reviewing existing critiques, I draw onthe work of Derrida to take a deconstructionist perspective, which probes the constructionof meaning through language. Deconstruction reveals that the term ‘authentic’ is highlyproblematic, working semantically to create a category of ‘inauthentic’, which is immedi-ately 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 ren-dering 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 theauthentic/inauthentic dyad exacerbates the current schism between approaches to legaleducation as being either vocational or liberal, threatening the intellectual integrity of a lawdegree as requiring the pursuit of legal knowledge as a good in its own right as opposed towhat is of current (i.e. mercantile) value. As such, rather than arguing for an expansion ora more nuanced reading of the term as per existing critiques, I argue for its abandonmentaltogether, considering it a deeply flawed and damaging term