Why our future lawyers may need a different kind of training

Legal education already treats certain skills as non-negotiable. No-one questions whether legal reasoning or legal research should be taught. They are woven through every stage of professional formation, cultivated rather than confined to a single module or unit of learning. Sustainability literacy deserves the same status. Yet across most law curricula, it remains optional, peripheral, or absent, and that gap should concern regulators and employers as much as it concerns academics.

The distinction matters. Whilst a topic can be added to a reading list, a competence should be built into how students think, argue, and advise. Legal reasoning works this way: students do not take a single module/unit of study and move on, they are expected to apply it in contract law, in criminal law, in every clinic and moot. Sustainability should follow the same model. Issues facing much of legal practice, from, for example, planning and housing to procurement, employment, and financial regulation, now have a sustainability dimension, which means every part of the curriculum has a role in cultivating that judgement, not just an elective environmental law course.

Research on legal education reform backs this shift. Instead of adding a standalone sustainability subject, embedding two or three sustainability-focused contact hours into each core compulsory module allows the space for the competence to develop cumulatively, the same way legal reasoning does. Surveys of law students support this view – in one 2023 Durham study, most students wanted more climate and sustainability content woven into their core teaching, not offered as an optional add-on.

What happens when sustainability judgement is missing becomes clear in how the profession is already engaging with new technology. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how legal work gets done, as it must, but its environmental footprint is rarely part of the professional conversation. The 2025 comprehensive special analysis report titled Energy and AI, by the International Energy Agency, finds that global data-centre electricity consumption is projected to more than double to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, with significant knock-on demands for water and critical minerals. A lawyer trained to treat sustainability as a genuine competence should weigh up whether use of an AI tool is a necessity for a task, rather than expedient or convenient.

This kind of cultivated professional judgement cannot be replicated in a single test in stand-alone modules. It belongs in the mindset of a developing legal professional which demands integrity and ethical behaviour in a commercial world motivated by efficient outcomes for clients and employers.

If sustainability literacy is cultivated rather than examined in isolation, the responsibility for embedding it does not disappear – it shifts toward those who set accreditation and curriculum standards. Regulators and professional bodies already shape what counts as core competence by defining and examining functioning legal knowledge and ethics. Why not extend that to sustainability?

The Cheshire and Warrington Local Skills Improvement Plan’s emphasis on closer ties between employers and education providers offers a practical mechanism by which collaboration can co-produce what ‘sustainability-literate’ looks like in practice, the same way essential human and business skills have developed into essential commercial awareness and employability expectations for law graduates.

Three shifts follow from treating sustainability as a cultivated, regulator-backed competence rather than an optional topic. Curriculum designers should stop asking “where does sustainability fit” and start asking “where doesn’t it,” embedding it across compulsory modules rather than isolating it. Regulators should extend accreditation expectations to cover sustainability judgement without necessarily requiring a discrete exam. Employers should treat sustainability literacy as an employability signal, recognising it as part of what makes a graduate genuinely practice-ready.

The profession that gets this right will produce lawyers who ask better questions before reaching for a tool, a regulation, or a client solution, not because they memorised a sustainability module, but because the judgement was built in from day one.

About the author

Associate Professor Ruth Sutton is Head of the School of Law and Social Justice at the University of Chester, a barrister and Chair of the Committee for Heads of University Law Schools. She specialises in legal education, professional formation, and access to justice, and regularly advises the legal regulators on professional formation and accreditation of legal professionals.

AI Declaration: AI was used in the planning and refinement of the initial drafts of this document. The background research, idea-generation, intellectual position and composition are the author’s own.