Affirmative Action and Aboriginal Government: The Case for Legal Education in Nunavut

Author(s):  
Kelly Gallagher-Mackay

AbstractThe Nunavut Land Claim Agreement commits federal and territorial governments to the recruitment and training of Inuit for positions throughout government. In the justice sector, there is currently a major shortage of Inuit lawyers or future judges. However, there also appears to be a fundamental mismatch between what existing law schools offer and what Inuit students are prepared to accept. A northern-based law school might remedy some of these problems. However, support for a law school requires un-thinking certain key tenets of legal education as we know it in Canada. In particular, it may require a step outside the university-based law school system. Universities appear to be accepted as the exclusive guardian of the concept of academic standards. Admission standards, in particular, serve as both a positivist technology of exclusion, and a political rationale for the persistence of majoritarian institutions as the major means of training members of disadvantaged communities. Distinctive institutions – eventually working with university-based law schools – have the potential to help bridge the education gap between Inuit and other Canadians. In so doing, they have the potential to train a critical mass of Inuit to meaningfully adapt the justice system to become a pillar of the public government in the Inuit homeland of Nunavut.

Author(s):  
Willem Hendrik Gravett

It is a sad fact that at most university law schools in South Africa, a student can graduate without ever having set foot in a courtroom, and without ever having spoken to, or on behalf of, a person in need of advice or counsel. The past several years have witnessed a swelling chorus of complaints that the current LLB curriculum produces law graduates who were "out of their depth" in practice. My purpose is to make a case for the inclusion in the LLB curriculum of a course in trial advocacy. This endeavour of necessity invokes the broader debate over the educational objectives of a university law school – a debate memorably framed by William Twining as the two polar images of "Pericles and the plumber". My thesis is that the education of practising lawyers should be the primary mission of the university law school. The first part of this contribution is a response to those legal academics who hold that the role of the law school is to educate law students in the theories and substance of the law; that it is not to function as a trade school or a nursery school for legal practice. With reference to the development of legal education in the United States, I argue that the "education/training" dichotomy has been exposed as a red herring. This so-called antithesis is false, because it assumes that a vocational approach is necessarily incompatible with such values as free inquiry, intellectual rigour, independence of thought, and breadth of perspective. The modern American law school has shown that such so-called incompatibility is the product of intellectual snobbery and devoid of any substance. It is also often said that the raison d'être of a university legal education is to develop in the law student the ability "to think like a lawyer". However, what legal academics usually mean by "thinking like a lawyer" is the development of a limited subset of the skills that are of crucial importance in practising law: one fundamental cognitive skill – analysis – and one fundamental applied skill – legal research. We are not preparing our students for other, equally crucial lawyering tasks – negotiating, client counselling, witness interviewing and trial advocacy. Thinking like a lawyer is a much richer and more intricate process than merely collecting and manipulating doctrine. We cannot say that we are fulfilling our goal to teach students to "think like lawyers", because the complete lawyer "thinks" about doctrine and about trial strategy and about negotiation and about counselling. We cannot teach students to "think like lawyers" without simultaneously teaching them what lawyers do. An LLB curriculum that only produces graduates who can "think like lawyers" in the narrow sense ill-serves them, the profession and the public. If the profession is to improve the quality of the services it provides to the public, it is necessary for the law schools to recognise that their students must receive the skills needed to put into practice the knowledge and analytical abilities they learn in the substantive courses. We have an obligation to balance the LLB curriculum with courses in professional competence, including trial advocacy – courses that expose our students to what actually occurs in lawyer-client relationships and in courtrooms. The skills our law students would acquire in these courses are essential to graduating minimally-competent lawyers whom we can hand over to practice to complete their training. The university law school must help students form the habits and skills that will carry over to a lifetime of practice. Nothing could be more absurd than to neglect in education those practical matters that are necessary for a person's future calling.


2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-578
Author(s):  
Bruce A. Kimball

Between 1915 and 1925, Harvard University conducted the first national public fund-raising campaign in higher education in the United States. At the same time, Harvard Law School attempted the first such effort in legal education. The law school organized its effort independently, in conjunction with its centennial in 1917. The university campaign succeeded magnificently by all accounts; the law school failed miserably. Though perfectly positioned for this new venture, Harvard Law School raised scarcely a quarter of its goal from merely 2 percent of its alumni. This essay presents the first account of this campaign and argues that its failure was rooted in longstanding cultural and professional objections that many of the school's alumni shared: law students and law schools neither need nor deserve benefactions, and such gifts worsen the overcrowding of the bar. Due to these objections, lethargy, apathy, and pessimism suffused the campaign. These factors weakened the leadership of the alumni association, the dean, and the president, leading to inept management, wasted time, and an unlikely strategy that was pursued ineffectively. All this doomed the campaign, particularly given the tragic interruptions of the dean's suicide and World War I, along with competition from the well-run campaigns for the University and for disaster relief due to the war.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric M. Adams

This article is about the making of modern legal education in North America. It is a case study of the lives of two law schools, the University of Alberta, Faculty of Law and the University of Minnesota Law School, and their respective deans, Wilbur Bowker and Everett Fraser, in the decades surrounding the Second World War. The article follows Bowker’s unorthodox route to Alberta’s deanship via his graduate training under the experimental “Minnesota Plan” — Fraser’s long-forgotten effort to place public service at the centre of American legal education. In detailing an overlooked moment of transition and soulsearching in North American legal education, this article underlines the personalities, ideologies, circumstances, and practices that combined to forge the still dominant model of university-based legal education across the continent. Highlighting the movement of people and ideas, this study corrects a tendency to understand the history of law schools as the story of single institutions and isolated visionaries. It also reveals the dynamic ways in which law schools absorbed and refracted the period’s ideological and political concerns into teaching practices and institutional arrangements. In bold experiment and innate conservatism, personal ambition and institutional constraints, and, above all else, faith in the power of law and lawyers, the postwar law school was born.


Author(s):  
Volodymyr Kakhnych

In the article the formation of legal education at the University of Melbourne, its short and successful path to worldwide recognitionis examined. The importance of researching such a successful example for national legal education is shown. Important researchby well-known professors who have worked at the University of Lviv and the University of Melbourne is depicted, and their contributionto the study of legal education in Melbourne is revealed.The author of the article shows that the experience of legal education in one of the oldest law schools in Australia – the Universityof Melbourne, which is now one of the world’s leading universities, as well as 50 best educational institutions in the world, is importantas an example of legal education for Ukrainian universities, in particular Lviv University. Legal education at Lviv University occupiesa significant place in the education of young professionals for crucial government positions.Founded in 1853, the University of Melbourne is the second oldest university in Australia. This is a state research university. Itconsists of 10 colleges located on the main campus and in the surrounding suburbs, which offer academic, cultural and sports programs.The University of Melbourne often ranks first among Australian universities in the world rankings. More than 46 % of his students areforeigners. This school is officially accredited by the Australian Department of Education and Training.The teaching of law, until 1873 at the University of Melbourne, was governed directly by the board and faculty; there was nocouncil or committee in charge of the faculty, and no head or administrator to lead the law course other than faculty and university officials.It was the council that decided on the details of the curriculum and considered students’ complaints about things like absenteeismand lecture venues. Other disciplines were in the same position. Not only in the field of law, but in general, the university did not havefaculties that would be responsible for certain areas of study.The university was so small that in 1872 it had only 134 students, 53 of whom studied law. In the early 1870s, the situation wasfavorable for change. The council committee explored the possibility of expanding the teaching of law by creating more subjects andlecture courses, and at the same time, by creating a new body, a faculty to oversee them.The council committee called this change the creation of a law school, and since then the terms “law school” (“law schools”) and“law faculty” have sometimes been interchangeable. Law classes were called a “school of law” for several months after their foundingin 1872. This term was sometimes used in another sense (as a discipline with honors). Despite the ambiguous terminology, the councilmeant the creation of the faculty and the accompanying reorganization of teaching in 1872–1873.The author of the article argues that building a legal education in Ukraine is impossible without a proper study of the experience,knowledge and practical skills that existed at the University of Melbourne. The opinion is based on the fact that the organization ofwork, cooperation with students and involvement of a large number of foreigners remains a model to follow. This approach to coope -ration and establishing contacts with their structure has made them famous and universally recognized worldwide. We can see thisbecause the University of Melbourne is now one of the world’s leading universities, as well as one of 50 best educational institutionsin the world.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie A. Dangel ◽  
Michael J Madison

Today’s law school graduates need to be entrepreneurial to succeed, but traditional legal education tends to produce lawyers who are “strange bedfellows” with entrepreneurs. This article begins by examining the innovative programs at many law schools that ameliorate this tension, including the programs offered by our Innovation Practice Institute (IPI) at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Although these programs train law students to represent entrepreneurs and to be entrepreneurial in law-related careers, few (if any) law schools train law students to be “business” entrepreneurs. Drawing on our own experiences and the writings of Bill Drayton, the lawyer who pioneered the field of social entrepreneurship, we discuss how some lawyers have applied their legal education to be successful “social” entrepreneurs. Finally, we outline the IPI’s three-year law school program explicitly designed to train law students to be social entrepreneurs.


2014 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 739 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Sandomierski

Law schools ought to have a vision for how they contribute to the public good. This article identifies two views of how public value might fit into the mission of the law school. The additive view holds that pursuing public value (cultivating “citizens”) and training “lawyers” are distinct objectives. This view underlies traditional claims that the law school should be housed in the university, and also accounts for the historic tension between academic law schools and the profession.By contrast, the integrative view holds that training lawyers and cultivating citizens are mutually reinforcing. This view inheres in the desire to ennoble the concept of professionalism, an old tendency that is presently in ascendance. A law school that embraces professionalism can place public value at the core of its mission, deploying its internal incentive structures in the service of the public good. However, the concept is at risk of becoming diluted or being imperfectly translated into practice. Furthermore, a sole focus on professionalism may marginalize or exclude certain conceptions of citizenship.To optimize its public value, the law school that embraces professionalism should take pains to ensure it retains its robust meaning. It can do so by locating discussions about public purpose in the privileged parts of the law school, and by investing in pedagogical innovations that truly integrate conceptions of “citizen” and “lawyer.” These efforts should be supplemented by innovations that promote diverse conceptions of the citizen that do not fit cleanly into the rubric of professionalism.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-108
Author(s):  
Lawrence Rosen

When I was thinking of going to law school, I went to speak with a law professor at the university where I had done my PhD. ‘Well, Mr. Rosen,’ he said, ‘the thing about law school is it will teach you how to think.’ I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop: think about law, think like a lawyer. No, he meant think – period. With all due humility, I was at that time coming from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and should like to imagine that I had actually learned a few things while doing my doctorate at his own university. In the forty years since, while serving as an adjunct professor of law and visiting professor at several such institutions, I have also encountered the occasional law scholar who, in a moment of academic noblesse oblige, has regarded my anthropology credentials as quaint but insufficient evidence that one has the tough-minded capacity that flows from a legal education. The lawyers may pay some attention to a few other disciplines, but, even though they may have given in to the allure of economics and bolstered their intellectual self-image with the odd philosopher or historian, the question remains why the law schools still tend to regard anthropology as almost entirely irrelevant.


2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-149
Author(s):  
Andra Le Roux-Kemp

Law schools are peculiar places occupied by, dependent on, associated with, and exerting influence on a myriad of institutions and stakeholders. From law students’ efforts at mastering the allusive skill of legal reasoning to the challenges both tenured and untenured academic staff face in the neoliberalist higher education model where the legal profession and the consumers of the law school product exert increasing – and sometimes even impossible – demands, law schools and its populace have always been contested, hierarchical and image-conscious spaces. Indeed, as Ralph Shain noted in the Journal of Ideology in 2012, “[a]nyone who has suffered through law school would be grateful to have a good polemic against the institution”. This article offers such a polemic against legal education in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Over a period of four years, a selection of postgraduate law students from one of the (three) higher education institutions responsible for legal education and training in Hong Kong were asked to reflect upon their legal studies and future roles as legal professionals with reference to the 1983 self-published pamphlet by Duncan Kennedy, entitled “Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System”. Kennedy’s essay offered a critical analysis of the role of legal education in American social life at that time, and the manner in which it reproduced hierarchy in law, legal education, the legal profession, as well as in society generally. The narratives informing this article show that almost 40 years subsequent the publication of Kennedy’s text, and in a jurisdiction with an altogether different social context and facing its own political turmoil and civil rights’ aspirations, many parallels can be drawn with what Kennedy had observed in 1983. Part I of this article sets the scene with a detailed overview of the legal education and training landscape of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region from a legal-historical perspective to date. The discussion and analysis then turn to the narratives of Hong Kong law students, offering a window into their experiences as (unintended) participants in the hierarchies of law and legal education in Hong Kong. Much more, however, can be gleaned from these narratives than just how these students perceive their present legal studies and future roles as legal professionals in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. These narratives also offer a critical reflection on Hong Kong’s colonial past and present status as a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China under the principle of “one country two systems” (Part II). Culture-specific values impacting on these students’ legal studies and career decisions are revealed (Part III), and troublesome shortcomings in the current legal education and training landscape vis-à-vis the legal professional fraternity and political and socio-economic reality of Hong Kong are laid bare (Part IV). Much like Kennedy’s 1983 essay failed to bring about any real change in how law schools go about their business as cogs in the apparatus of social hierarchy, the narratives informing this article also conclude on a rather sombre and futile note. Be that as it may. At least their voices have been heard and the seemingly inescapable power struggles noted. This too is an important function of the law and legal discourse.


2021 ◽  
pp. 987
Author(s):  
Loren Lee

Since 1978, the Supreme Court has recognized diversity as a compelling government interest to uphold the use of affirmative action in higher education. Yet the constitutionality of the practice has been challenged many times. In Grutter v. Bollinger, for example, the Court denied its use in perpetuity and suggested a twenty-five-year time limit for its application in law school admissions. Almost two decades have passed, so where do we stand? This Note’s quantitative analysis of the matriculation of and degrees awarded to Black and Latinx students at twenty-nine accredited law schools across the United States illuminates a stark lack of progress toward critical mass since Grutter and reveals the continued need for affirmative action in law school admissions.


2014 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antoinette Sedillo Lopez ◽  
Cameron Crandall ◽  
Gabriel Campos ◽  
Diane Rimple ◽  
Mary Neidhart ◽  
...  

<p>Assessment of skills is an important, emerging topic in law school education. Two recent and influential books, Educating Lawyers published by the Carnegie Foundation and Best Practices in Legal Education, published by the Clinical Legal Education Association have both suggested dramatic reform of legal education. Among other reforms, these studies urge law schools to use “outcome-based” assessments, i.e., using learning objectives  and assessing knowledge and skills in standardized situations based on specific criteria, rather than simply comparing students’ performances to each other. </p>


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