INTRODUCTION

The UK legal community has in recent years experienced growing concern about the wellbeing and mental health of lawyers.This is an interest reflected across an array of practical and policy initiatives, reports, research studies, articles and books on the topic, as well as substantial media coverage. Much of the wider legal wellness literature in the UK context, as elsewhere, has tended to focus on the areas of legal professional practice and law students within legal education and training. There are tentative signs, however, of a heightened focus within UK legal studies on the wellbeing and mental health of university legal academics (see below).This chapter seeks to connect up this emerging discussion of legal academic wellbeing with the more established wellbeing debates taking place across the UK legal services sector. By unpacking selected themes within a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary literature on academic wellbeing in UK universities, the chapter explores shared concerns and themes, as well as significant points of difference, in how wellbeing is conceptualised across these discrete legal fields.

A closer look at what is shared across law schools and the legal professions, it is argued here, can shed considerable light on our understandings of the place and purpose of university legal education itself at the present moment; and how, with regard to wellbeing, specific legal‘ communities … act as containers for their own experiences, doubts, joys and frustrations‘. In moving‘ beyond silos‘, this chapter suggests, research and theory about learning the law and legal education has much to gain from a closer engagement with the legal wellbeing debates. At the same time, the emergence of wellbeing as a distinctive kind of problem to be addressed by discrete legal communities must be set in the context of structural and cultural changes productive of new ideas of legal professionalism, enmeshed with the law‘s current‘ wellbeing problem‘– a development impacting on lawyers, law students and legal academics alike, albeit in different and frequently contradictory ways.