The ALT offers its members the opportunity to apply for several grants, awards, and prizes. To be eligible, you must be a fully paid-up member in the year of your application and you must use the relevant application forms which will be made available on the website when applications are open.
Our Grants
The Stan Marsh Bursary
The Stan Marsh bursary supports attendance at the ALT Annual Conference and can cover the conference fee, travel and accommodation. To apply for a Stan Marsh bursary, please email Dr David Yuratich at D.A.Yuratich@exeter.ac.uk. Your application should include your name, institutional affiliation (if any) and a supporting statement of no more than 250 words. Your statement should explain why you do not have recourse to other sources of funding (such as institutional research or scholarship allowances) and should outline how you would benefit from attendance at the conference. Please note that priority will be given to early career scholars and to those on precarious contracts.
The Law Teacher / ALT Seminar Fund
We are keen to promote high quality legal education scholarship that can be described as rigorous with significant reach. Applicants propose a one-off seminar or series of events in online, face-to-face or hybrid formats. Applicants can specify individual speakers/contributors and/or propose a wider call for papers.
Annual Prizes
Stan Marsh Prizes for ‘Best Paper’ and ‘Best Poster’
The Association of Law Teachers is delighted to be able to award prizes for the best paper and best poster presented at the annual conference each year. To be entered for the competition, please send abstracts for the conference proceedings in the usual manner and as instructed to in the call for papers, but mark your abstract or proposal clearly with ‘to be entered into the Stan Marsh Competition’. If your paper abstract is accepted for the conference, you will need to submit your full paper in advance to give the judging panel time to read the paper. Posters will be judged by the panel during the conference and do not need to be sent in advance.
The judging panel for both the best paper and the best poster will consist of members of the ALT Committee and//or Conference Committee and they will judge the entries based on the following criteria:
For both poster and papers: (a) a strong educational message or finding which is (b) based on existing and/or developing legal education research (c) linked to the conference themes (see above). For papers only (as presented at the conference): (a) engagement of audience and (b) clarity of presentation. For posters only: (a) eye-catching poster, (b) appropriate use of poster format and (c) clear coverage.
Chris Gale Memorial Prize
The ALT is honoured to be able to award the joint Committee of Head of University Law Schools (CHULS) and ALT Chris Gale Memorial Prize. The prize is awarded to the best joint paper presented at the conference and aims to celebrate values of collegiality, collaboration and support in legal education research.
To be entered for the prize, please send abstracts for the conference proceedings in the usual manner and is instructed in the call for papers, but mark your abstract or proposal clearly with ‘to be entered for the Chris Gale Memorial Prize’. If your paper abstract is accepted for the conference, you will need to submit your full paper in advance to give the judging panel time to consider your work. You can submit for both the Best Paper and the Chris Gale Memorial Prize.
The judging panel will consist of members of the ALT Committee and/or the Conference Committee and they will judge the entries based on the following criteria: (a) a co-authored paper with at least two authors and presenters, (b) joint presentation of the paper which is engaging and clear with (c) a strong educational message or finding which is (d) based on existing and/or developing legal education research, (e) linked to the conference theme.
The winners for all prizes will be announced at the Annual Dinner on the first evening of the conference, so the presentations for prize entrants have to be scheduled for the first day of the conference. The prize for the best paper is £250 and the prize for the best poster is £100. The prize for the Chris Gale Memorial Prize is £200.
Roll of Honour
2026
Understanding the Lived Experience of Aspirant Barristers from Non-Russell Group Universities
Charlotte Harrison and Shane McKinder – University of Portsmouth
£2,971
This project will explore the lived experiences of aspirant barristers from non-Russell Group universities as they navigate the early stages of the path to pupillage. Despite regulatory and sector-wide commitments to widening participation, entry to the Bar remains heavily stratified by institutional background, with students from non-elite universities significantly underrepresented. This landscape informed the creation of the Barristers-in-Residence programme at the University of Portsmouth, which seeks to demystify routes into the Bar and make visible the hidden curriculum shaping access to the profession. The findings from this project will generate empirical evidence to inform the development of this programme, and contribute to wider sector debates on access, graduate capital, and equal opportunities for careers at the Bar.
Drawing on interviews with students and recent graduates at different stages of the path to pupillage, alongside interviews with practising barristers, the project will examine how visible, structural and hidden barriers shape confidence, decision-making, and persistence. The data analysis will be informed by Tomlinson’s Graduate Capital Model illuminating how inequalities in graduate capital play a decisive role in shaping confidence and success in securing pupillage and identifying which forms of support are experienced as being most impactful. The project will strengthen the literature on graduate capitals in a legal education context, while providing an evidence base to inform career development interventions. The project aligns with ALT priorities on widening participation, employability, and student belonging, and supports professional bodies’ shared objective of diversifying entry to the Bar.
Scaling up Street Law within the UK and Ireland
Frances Ridout – Queen Mary University of London; Linden Thomas – University of Birmingham; Hannah Menard – University of South Wales; Lughaidh Kerin – University of Westminster; John Lunney – The Law Society of Ireland
£1,500
The aim of this project is to develop and curate a bank of high-quality, open access Street Law resources, suitable for delivery to school aged children which university law schools and teachers readily adopt, thereby scaling up delivery of public legal education in a key area in the UK and Ireland. Three things are required to do this;
- A mapping exercise;
- What free legal education projects (delivery) and resources (self-use lesson plans etc.) are already available freely for schools?
- What legal topics are covered in the different curriculums of England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland?
- A creative writing workshop retreat bringing together the leading academics in the field to design Street Law workshops.
- The development and running of a website to disseminate workshops, best practice and raise the profile of Street Law.*
This project will increase capacity for Street Law in the UK and Ireland.
* Funding for this element of the project was not given under the ALT Grant. However, a separate discussion is ongoing regarding ALT’s support for a Street Law website.
The Art of Law: Creative Pedagogy, Decolonisation and Reclaiming the Legal Imagination in the Age of AI
Nichola McNulty – Bath Spa University
£2,250
This research project, ‘The Art of Law’, investigates how creative pedagogy can reclaim and strengthen students’ critical legal thinking in the face of two major challenges: the urgent need for decolonisation and the rise of Generative AI. This project will utilise innovative methods including law and literature, zine-making, creative collage and performance techniques to cultivate the ‘Legal Imagination’ (J.B. White’s concept of law as a critical art), which is essential for authentic, AI-resistant legal education and practice.
The research will host a co-creation workshop to co-design and refine a pedagogical framework with law teachers and undergraduate students, and to co-design a robust evaluation protocol.
An empirical pilot will measure the impact of these methods on students’ critical expression, academic integrity, and engagement with decolonial perspectives. This is a timely and significant study into innovation in legal education that will produce a scalable, evidence-based pedagogical toolkit for the sector.
2025
‘Revaluing Nature’: Using Bi-Cultural Law and Craftivism in Transformative Environmental Law Learning
Caroline Keenan and Tom Baycock, University of Exeter
£1,450
For the last four years, we have delivered active learning activities on an inter-disciplinary cross-campus environmental law module, focussing on a type of bi-cultural law legislation granting legal personhood to natural entities in New Zealand. These statutes incorporate common law legal personhood with Tikanga Maori (law), ‘visions for knowing and caring’ for nature ‘in its own right not as a possession’. The Acts are drafted to include poetic declarations of the ‘identity’ of a natural entity, reflecting long established relationships and understandings. Our students choose a species, space or natural entity and write their own ‘identity sections’ of statute in the form of a preamble to an act granting legal personhood to their entity, before analysing the benefits and disadvantages of a range of legal mechanisms to their choice in their assessment project. Students consistently rate this process as a highlight of their degree.
The ALT grant enables us to develop and disseminate this work in 3 ways:
- Development of learning activities using craftivism methodology to surface values and measures of justice in relation to the natural world.
Currently we use a bi-cultural legal format, divorced from an equivalent identifiable cultural basis. We will use this grant to work with Open the Box Arts to develop ‘craftivist’ learning practices, those which support students to connect with their inherent values and sense of justice by the process of making.
- Demonstrate how and why activities combining affective and psychomotor learning with cognitive learning of law can be effective tools.
This work will include a study using student ‘friendship conversations’ between two friends, one who completed the original learning activities on the module and one who completed both the original and newly developed activities.
- Open Access ‘Playbook for Educators and Learners’ setting out step by step guides to achieving the intended learning outcomes, by delivering these learning activities.
We hope to enable other legal educators to deliver these types of learning activities in their own modules and for other learners to benefit from them, using the format of an accessible playbook.
Understanding Legal Literacy and Disciplinary Skills
Hannah Gibbons-Jones, University of Nottingham
Pilot collaboration partners (to support the pilot and student recruitment participation, and to collaborate on evaluation and next steps – phase two UK based study): CEPLER team/Frances Seabridge – University of Birmingham; Stella Coyle and Abigail Pearson – Keele University; Elyse Wakelin/Legal Education Team – Nottingham Trent University
£1,550
The aim of this research is to increase the understanding of disciplinary literacy (how undergraduate law students read primary sources) in order to identify and develop scholarship support for students who are challenged by the navigation and formatting of legal texts.
To assist students to ‘read law’, academics spend time modifying teaching, developing learning materials, providing guidance, and increasing skills support. However, prior reading experience and data on the practicalities of reading do not always inform this support.
This research aims to investigate the perception of reading, and to gather data on the strategies used to navigate the process of reading generated by using eye tracking data. This research aims to gather information to support a practical change in disciplinary literacy advice and guidance for students in a time where the use of AI and the availability information shortcuts is increasing.
Examining Equality and Diversity in Law Clinic Recruitment: Pilot Study
Lee Hansen, Donald Nicolson, Olayinka Lewis – University of Essex
£1,866
Law clinics provide a valuable experience for a wide range of students and help address unmet legal needs amongst disadvantaged groups. However, it is unclear whether student access to law clinics is itself equitable in terms of students’ social background. By examining historic data at the Essex Law Clinic, this project is intended as a pilot for a much wider study involving other university law clinics with different demographic profiles and recruitment processes – two of which have already expressed interest in collaboration. The pilot will be used to inform immediate changes to recruitment practices at Essex Law Clinic and to evaluate the methods and criteria used to measure potential disadvantage. Feedback on the evaluation methodology, as well as additional collaborators for the main comparative study will be sought by presenting the findings at conferences organised by the Global Alliance for Justice Education (GAJE) and the Clinical Legal Education Organisation (CLEO).
Read more about the project in this blog post: https://lawteacher.ac.uk/who-gets-through-the-door-rethinking-access-to-law-clinic-opportunities/
International Law Vocabulary Highlighter
Jenny Kemp and Stephen Riley – University of Leicester
Thuy Thai, University of Leeds
£2,975
The project aims to create, introduce and evaluate a vocabulary software tool for use by law students. Students studying postgraduate private and public international law frequently come from non-UK and/or non-law backgrounds. This puts them at a disadvantage in terms of academic literacy for law. In particular, they can struggle with the reading demands of their courses. Kemp (2022; 2024) identified a list of 1026 pervasive, law-specific words in the texts on LLM reading lists. The freely available online International Law Highlighter Tool will enable students to copy and paste a text they are reading and see the words on the list highlighted. This will enable students to autonomously identify and prioritise their vocabulary learning needs. Students will be trained to use the tool and their opinions sought via questionnaire and focus groups in order to evaluate the project.
Read more about the project in this blog post: https://lawteacher.ac.uk/introducing-the-international-law-highlighter/
The International Law Highlighter is available here: https://law-highlighter.online/
How Great Law Teachers Teach: Mapping a ‘Gold Standard’ for Law Teaching in the UK University Law School
Louise Loder and Greta Bosch – University of Exeter
£2,790
By synthesising the literature, collating the experiences of law teachers, students and other stakeholders, and observing the teaching practice of ‘great’ law school educators, this project aims to (i) identify what makes a ‘great’ law teacher great in the UK law school, and (ii) explore the feasibility of developing a peer-led law teacher training platform, made available on an open access basis and featuring short but powerful nanocourses, interactive resources, collaborative reading lists and teacher templates.
2024
New Trends in Teaching Contract Law
Jeanette Ashton and Jo Wilson – University of Sussex
£1470
This one-day conference, to be held at the University of Sussex on 12 September 2024, will explore new pedagogic approaches and practices in the context of teaching contract law.
We are proposing to adopt a ‘round table’ approach to maximise open discussion and engagement. Draft papers will be shared among participants in advance of the conference and each presenter will be given a 45-minute slot. This will be followed by brief comments from a respondent, and then there will be time for discussion and reflection around the ‘round table’ from the participants.
We intend for 8 papers to be shared and discussed across the day, and we are hoping to host 30 participants in total. Following the conference, we are planning for each paper to feature in the special issue of The Law Teacher.
This conference will set the foundation for an engaging and pedagogically robust Law Teacher Special Issue. Through this, we will highlight and explore issues and topics that will be of interest and importance not only to those that teach contract law, but to the wider legal education community. We are particularly keen to demonstrate, through the paper presentations, that innovative approaches to teaching are possible, even in core modules with large student numbers. Contract underpins several areas of commercial practice and engaging students from the outset is essential.
The Special Issue has now been published in The Law Teacher (2025), Volume 59, Issue 4, available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ralt20/59/4
360° of Legal Education: A Holistic Enquiry into Student Experience
Michael Doherty, Noel McGuirk, Tina McKee, Kathryn Saban, and Sadie Whittam – Lancaster University
£3000
The project aims to draw on design thinking methods of user personas, vignettes and user experience journey mapping to take an innovative approach to exploring student experience in legal education.
It seeks to demonstrate ways of undertaking enquiry and scholarship into legal education that are not limited by thematic boundaries (assessment, teaching and learning, wellbeing, employability, etc). These can often examine the experience of students in relation to specific themes in isolation. We propose that it is possible to explore student experiences of legal education in a more holistic way.
The key event in the project will be a one-day workshop examining the journey of personas (personified representations of a small number of students) through various stages and events of their legal education. We hope to uncover the interactions, ripples and entanglements that occur for these students between both those different thematic events and with their wider lives.
Levelling Up Law – An Exploration of How Leading Law Firms Approach Widening Access to the Legal Profession
Siobhan McConnell and Jill Alexander – Northumbria University
£2610.40
Law Society data (2023) shows that the largest law firms have the greatest proportion of solicitors from higher socioeconomic backgrounds (65%) and private schools (28%). The continuing focus on levelling up means that larger firms are turning their attention to more diverse student populations, including students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and from post-92 institutions.
The aim of this project is to understand from the literature and an empirical study how the larger law firms are approaching diversity at the point of access to the profession. Are traditional approaches to recruitment changing? If so, how, and what is the impact? This research aims to explore whether and how diversity schemes are working in practice and their impact on recruitment. It also seeks to understand more about how larger firms engage with students who have traditionally not been recruitment targets, being those from diverse, under-resourced and underrepresented groups.
Clients & Courtrooms: The Gamification of Legal Problem Solving in a Tabletop Role-Playing Game
Steven Montagu-Cairns and Josh Warburton – University of Leeds
Craig Newbery-Jones – University of Exeter
£3045.60
The project aims to evaluate the viability of pen-and-paper role-playing games (RPGs) as a tool for legal education. The principal objective is to design, develop, and appraise a tabletop RPG specifically for use in legal education, integrating core legal principles, case studies, and procedural scenarios. This RPG will provide an innovative method to enhance students’ critical thinking, legal reasoning, and collaborative problem-solving skills.
A secondary objective is to position this in the pedagogic literature and literature of legal education. Finally, this project will measure engagement and collect feedback from student participants in order to consider the viability of RPGs as an effective tool for legal education and skills development. While this project would act as a pilot, it is envisaged that the project will provide a base game system for use in a range of specific legal subjects and even across a range of different subjects, both domestically and internationally.
Legal Education in Primary Schools: Ideas, Realities and Practicalities
Malvika Unnithan, Northumbria University; Ali Struthers, University of Warwick
£2927.40
This project looks to develop the existing research on legal education in primary schools by bringing together academics, teachers, school staff, children and parents/guardians for a roundtable event. This event will be at the heart of the proposed project which is focused on creating a common and safe space to discuss ideas from research, practice and lived experience. This is an important undertaking as legal education for primary school children is not discussed as widely as it is for secondary schools and higher education, and if it has been, it is often in a widening participation context. The need for teaching primary school children about the law is often overlooked despite the age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales being 10 and the rights children have under the UNCRC. The proposed event seeks to highlight this research agenda and support the sharing of practices and ideas within this community.
Read more about the project in this blog post: https://lawteacher.ac.uk/legal-education-in-primary-schools-ideas-realities-and-practicalities/
