Law Faculty Grants

The underlying objective of Law Faculty Grants is to maintain and, if possible, to increase the number of good first-degree law graduates leaving universities, thus increasing the number of good graduates entering the solicitors' profession.

Experience has shown that the best training still revolves around the legal essentials with contract, tort, property law, equity and jurisprudence as a starting point although, over the years, the committee has extended the range of its grants to include european law, environmental law and human rights law. The Committee will not give priority to applications concerned with "City" legal topics. However, applications related to those areas with a commercial flavour which are of importance to solicitors generally such as, in particular, company law would be considered.

In addition to support for teaching posts, assistance is given for law libraries and other support resources.

Grants are not given for legal practice courses or for fostering vocational skills. Post-graduate or research projects will not normally be supported and applications for grants to fund appointments at law faculties will not be sympathetically considered unless the appointee will devote the majority of time to teaching first-degree students.

The amount available for grants will still be relatively small in relation to the total need for finance from the teaching institutions. Increasingly CSET has only been willing partially to fund projects, particularly teaching posts. This assistance has normally led to the faculty being able to unlock the balance from its university's central finances or other funders. CSET will also be influenced by the efforts that an institution has made to fund a project itself.

These principles and other considerations which the Committee take into account when assessing applications for grants are set out in detail in the Criteria, a copy of which may be downloaded click here