For almost 100 years Birmingham Law School has led the way in legal education and research. One of the world’s finest law schools, we continue to provide our students with innovative, challenging and research-driven education.
Our research contributes not only to the legal profession, but also to business, governance, public policy, NGOs, and the arts, as well as to the discipline of law per se. Located in the country’s first civic university, we are a global, diverse and civic law school committed to excellence in all of our endeavours.
We provide an expansive range of programmes, for undergraduate and postgraduate taught masters and doctoral studies and employ a range of approaches in our teaching and our research, from the theoretical and doctrinal to the empirical and applied. Our research is recognised on a global stage, and our academics are frequent participants in legal debates and contribute to the policy-making process. We provide students with more than just a degree, and enable them to develop the skills required to enhance their employability.
Our Centre for Employability, Professional Legal Education and Research (CEPLER) presents students with opportunities to increase their knowledge of law in action through Pro Bono, Mooting and over 50 law-specific career events each year. CEPLER's work is one of the many things that have led to Birmingham being recognised as the University of the Year for Graduate Employability in the Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2016.
Our History
Students who are admitted to Birmingham Law School become members of a large and long-established group of lawyers affiliated to the University, where law has been taught since 1904, very shortly after the University’s foundation as the country’s first civic university.
At that time, FW Tillyard was appointed as Lecturer in Commercial Law in the Faculty of Commerce, and he was subsequently Professor of Commercial Law from 1913-1930. The Department of Legal Studies was established in 1923, where Professor Tillyard was joined by Charles Smalley-Baker, a young Canadian lawyer who was appointed as the first Barber Professor of Law. That department became the Faculty of Law in 1928, and Birmingham Law School in 2007.
Since those early beginnings, Birmingham Law School has emerged as one of the best law schools in the world, and our degree programmes have expanded from the LLB to a whole suite of interdisciplinary undergraduate degrees, Masters programmes, and a vibrant graduate research programme. Reflecting the historical generosity of the Barber family to the School, we continue to have two Barber Professorships, currently held by Professor Anthony Arnull and Professor Nelson Enonchong.
In 1925, what was then the Faculty of Arts of the University of Birmingham instituted the Birmingham LLB, the flagship undergraduate law degree that we continue to deliver today. The four students who, in 1925, had been studying for an external law degree through the University transferred to the new LLB and graduated with the University’s first LLB degrees in 1927. These first four graduates were Augustus William Dickson, Leslie Joseph Biddle, John Kendall Gale, and Harry Turner Meades.
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