Lawyering skills are increasingly part of the curriculum, whether on undergraduate law degrees, on joint honours degrees, on the postgraduate diploma in law, and (most obviously) on the postgraduate vocational law courses, such as the Legal Practice Course (LPC) and the Bar Vocational Course (BVC).

Once, there was a view that the study of practical lawyering skills was somehow separate from and lesser than the study of ‘proper’ law—the ‘Pericles and the plumber’ debate, as it became known.1 In other jurisdictions, such as America and Australia, that debate is now of historical interest only: law is taught in all its formsthe academic, the practical, the socio-political, the clinical. No one form needs to be seen as more important than any other; no one form needs to be seen as undermining the study of any other. We hope very much that this book will contribute to that process in this jurisdiction.