The first principle is that there is no single model of legal education that ought to trump all others. Absolute principles do not prevail which determine the nature and form of legal education that ought to prevail. No matter how we insist upon providing a basic legal education, with a loose array of electives, the functional character of the legal education actually provided will inevitably be diverse in form, method and result. A further guiding principle is that legal education necessarily diverges in different law schools settings. Not only are law teachers influenced by different values and interests in teaching in the same setting.
Differences also arise on account of legal cultures developing in different law school settings.
The final guiding principle is that attempts to render uniform these guiding principles ignores the extent to which a central mission of legal education is to support such differences in the values and interests that guide legal education. In some respect, this is already the case in Canada. But such a mission statement is altogether too narrow in its functional ends. Rendering law and economics and welfarism into solitary missions of law school at seemingly polar extremes is to deny the relative values that inhere in law and unavoidably, in educating about it. Identifying the mission of law schools undoubtedly gives rise to enormous tension.