Downsizing Teaching: The Case for Seminars as the Backbone of Law Degrees

2021 ◽  
pp. 232200582110684
Author(s):  
Paolo Vargiu
Keyword(s):  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Delivery Methods ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Intellectual Abilities ◽  
Approach To Teaching ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Law Degree ◽  
School Curricula

This article is aimed at contributing to the ongoing debate on the purpose of law school and the work of law teachers, calling for a scholarship-based approach to teaching, centred on culture, research and method and advocating for seminars to replace lectures as the core method of teaching delivery in law schools. The article addresses, under this perspective, the salient elements of legal education: the philosophy of a teacher, the function of lectures and seminars, the problem of the time necessary to gain the required preparation, the importance of reading and the role played by assessment in the economy of a law degree. It is argued that teaching delivery methods should be the subject of constant reflection, and that the drafting of law school curricula should aim at cultivating the intellectual abilities and curiosity of law students, focussing on their education rather than their mere instruction.

scholarly journals Online Clinical Legal Education: Challenging the Traditional Model

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Les McCrimmon ◽  
Ros Vickers ◽  
Ken Parish
Keyword(s):  
Legal Education ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Traditional Model ◽  
Degree Programs ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Use Of Technology ◽  
Law Degree

<p>It has been suggested that the “Digital Age provides an opportunity to revitalize and modernize legal education and to make it more individualized, relevant, human, and accessible”. Delivery of law degree programs fully online is one way the internet has begun to change, if not (yet) revolutionise, legal education in the twenty-first century.  In Australia, law students have been able to obtain their law degree online for a number of years.  Online clinical legal education, however, is still in its infancy.</p><p>In this article, the authors argue that the greater use of technology in legal education is inevitable, and law schools offering degrees fully online will continue to increase, at least in Australia. The rewards and risks of online legal education are considered from the perspective of a law school in which over 80% of its 855 students study law fully online. The development and implementation of clinical opportunities for students studying online also is discussed.</p><div><div><p> </p></div></div>

Developing law students’ communicative-linguistic competence: Analysis of eight Spanish legal textbooks from a sociopragmatic perspective

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseba Ezeiza Ramos
Keyword(s):  
Professional Practice ◽  
Communicative Competence ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Educational Materials ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Approach To Teaching ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Spanish Universities ◽  
Law Degree ◽  
Strategic Skills

AbstractThis article presents a study carried out on eight Spanish legal textbooks in order to draw up an inventory of educational resources available to support the development of law students’ communicative competence, taking into account the law degree curricula at Spanish universities (Ezeiza Ramos forthcoming a, forthcoming b). The analysis was carried out by using a sociopragmatic approach to teaching language with specific purposes (Bhatia 2002a, 2002b, 2004, 2008, 2010), which postulates that the acquisition of specialist communicative competence requires a tactical space in which obtaining discursive knowledge in its double (social and textual) dimension and learning about the subject itself are combined, thus taking into account the nature of relevant professional practice itself. Applied in the legal sciences area, this perspective takes the form of a pedagogical model based on three main axes (Candlin & Bhatia 1998, quoted in Bhatia et al. 2004): a) practice contexts; b) text genres; and c) strategic skills. From this starting point, I analysed: a) the learning and language use contexts offered in the textbooks studied; b) the text genres which educational materials are based on; and c) the dimensions of competence development (

Scattering of journals cited in legal theses and dissertations

2021 ◽  
pp. 096100062110367
Author(s):  
Siviwe Bangani ◽  
Michiel Moll
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
The Core ◽  
Bradford’S Law ◽  
Master's Thesis ◽  
Doctoral Dissertations ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Theses And Dissertations

The study employed bibliometrics methods to analyse the scattering of 596 journals cited in legal master’s theses and doctoral dissertations in three South African law schools from 2014 to 2018. In addition, the study included an analysis of the extent of citation of different sources and examined the effect of use of non-legal journals by law students. It was found that students used 449.2 documents on average in writing a doctoral dissertation and 110.9 references per master’s thesis. Journals received more citations than any other document formats although 16 master’s theses were completed without citing a single journal. Generally, the journals cited in legal theses and dissertations conform to Bradford’s Law but they differ in their level of conformity by law school. There was a high degree of overlaps between Zone 1 journals in the three law schools. All journals in the core lists were available in all the law schools which was attributed to the strength of collections in these schools. The results support the application of bibliometric analyses to legal master’s theses and doctoral dissertations to make collection development decisions. In making those decisions, however, law librarians would have to look beyond the Zone 1 journals of their own institution for wider access. These results also serve as a caution to law librarians to look beyond the traditional law journals in de/selecting journals, as some of the non-legal journals in this study made it to the core list of cited periodicals. Furthermore, this study points to the strength of library collections in the top law school libraries in the country.

scholarly journals Transforming legal education through emotions

Legal Studies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 450-479 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Jones
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Objective Analysis ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Law Degree

AbstractLaw has traditionally viewed emotions as the enemies of rationality and reason, irrational and potentially dangerous forces which must be suppressed or disregarded. This separation and enmity has been mirrored within undergraduate legal education in England and Wales, with its rigid focus on seemingly impartial and objective analysis and notions such as the ubiquitous ‘thinking like a lawyer’. This paper will argue that attempts to disregard or suppress emotions within the law school are both misguided and destined to fail. It will explore the integral part emotions play within effective legal learning, the development of legal skills, and the well-being of both law students and legal academics. It will also consider how developments in legal scholarship and the evolving climate of higher education generally offer some potential, but also pitfalls, for the future acknowledgment and incorporation of emotions within undergraduate legal education in England and Wales. Bodies of literature relating to not only legal education, but also education generally, psychology and philosophy will be drawn on to demonstrate that emotions have a potentially transformative power within legal education, requiring them to be acknowledged and utilised within a more holistic, integrated form of law degree.

scholarly journals Lawyers of the future: Creating aspirations, forging connections and facilitating professional links in rural and regional contexts

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sher Campbell ◽  
Katherine Lindsay
Keyword(s):  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Professional Service ◽  
Legal Practice ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Phase ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Program

In recent years, the Australian legal profession, government policymakers and the nation’s law schools have evinced concern about the future of legal practice beyond metropolitan areas. The issues and suggested responses have been debated in various fora amongst the stakeholders. This paper explores the way in which one regional law schoolwith a distinctive approach to legal education has responded to these issues from an educational and pastoral perspective. Newcastle Law School established its Lawyers of the Future program in 2009. Lawyers of the Future is a multi-faceted initiative, which promotes professional partnerships with the secondary education sector through the Schools’ Visit program, and partnerships with rural and regional professionals through active connections in those areas. The third phase of the Lawyers of the Future program will be the development of rural and regional legal placement sites for senior law students enrolled in Newcastle’s Professional program.Whilst the Lawyers of the Future program has three distinctive and interrelated elements and objectives, it is the placement program that provides the lynchpin. Such a placement program, which is innovative in itself, has a greater educational purpose: the experience of practice in rural and regional areas, together with the process of subsequent engaged and critical reflection, will contribute meaningfully to the development of students’ professional personae in ways which will support an ethos of professional service beyond the narrow confines of practice in the metropolis for the legal conglomerates. 

Linkages Between International Human Rights and U.S. Constitutional Law

1985 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 158-163
Author(s):  
Richard B. Lillich ◽  
Hurst Hannum
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
School Curriculum ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
International Human Rights Law ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
International Human

While many law schools now offer separate courses or seminars on international human rights law, the number of students exposed to such specialized study remains relatively small. Human rights law is relevant to many other segments of the law school curriculum—in particular, to courses on constitutional law and individual rights—although little scholarly attention has been devoted to date to integrating appropriate human rights issues into the “bread and butter” courses that all law students take. To begin to address this lacuna, the Procedural Aspects of International Law (PAIL) Institute has undertaken to develop a human rights component or module designed to supplement leading constitutional law course books and present methods of teaching constitutional law.

scholarly journals ‘Placing’ the other: final year law students’ ‘imagined’ experience of rural and regional practice within the law school context

2012 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Trish Karen Mundy
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Student Attitudes ◽  
Research Study ◽  
School Context ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
The Law ◽  
Depth Interviews

This paper discusses the partial findings from a research study involving a narrative analysis of in-depth interviews with twelve final year law students. The research explored student attitudes to, and perceptions of, legal practice in rural, regional and remote (RRR) communities – that is, their ’imagined experience’. The research findings suggests that, at least in the context of the non-regional law school, the rural/regional is both absent and ‘other’, revealing the ‘urban-centric’ nature of legal education and its failure to adequately expose students to rural and regional practice contexts that can help to positively shape their ‘imagined’ experience. This paper argues that all law schools must take up the challenge of rural inclusiveness by integrating a sense of ‘place-consciousness’ into the law curriculum.

scholarly journals Sites of Resistance: LGBTQI+ Experiences at Trinity Western University

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-133
Author(s):  
Heather Shipley
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Law School ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
Sexual Diversity ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Potential Harm ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law

AbstractTrinity Western University’s Community Covenant has been the subject of public and legal attention with specific reference to a proposed law school. At the heart of much of the contention about the law school, opponents have expressed concern about the provisions in the Covenant that restrict the rights of LGBTQI+ students—their identities and relationships. While much of the focus has been on the potential harm for LGBTQI+ students, and the expectation that law schools uphold Charter values—the voices of queer students and allies have largely been sidelined. This article offers space for LGBTQI+ students, staff and allies to discuss their lived experiences of sexual diversity and the harm facing the queer community at Trinity Western University. As they state, the Covenant is only a part of the issue; the culture it supports is what needs to change.

Globalizing the U.S. Law School Curriculum: How Should Legal Educators Respond?

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farida Ali
Keyword(s):  
Legal Education ◽  
School Curriculum ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Current State ◽  
Northwestern University ◽  
Current Program ◽  
The Impact ◽  
School Curricula

This article examines the implications of globalization for legal practice, law students, and law school curricula. It opens with a review of the impact of globalization on the legal profession, together with an overview of the benefits and challenges that come with globalizing legal education. The article then examines the current state of U.S. legal education by identifying some of the schools that have expressed or demonstrated a commitment to providing a global legal education, and surveying the types of reforms that these schools have adopted in order to meet this objective. The article considers schools’ attitudes to and choice of reforms in light of the view that the typical new American lawyer is inadequately prepared to practice law in today's global legal order, in which he or she is increasingly likely to be called upon to resolve legal issues of a transnational nature. Preparing students to practice law in a globalized society, the article contends, should therefore be a key objective for American legal educators. With this goal in mind, the article examines the current program at Northwestern University School of Law as a case study and offers recommendations that can help to achieve the goal of globalizing legal education while responding to the needs and concerns of today's law students and future legal practitioners.

The Disastrous First Fund-Raising Campaign in Legal Education: The Harvard Law School Centennial, 1914–1920

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-578
Author(s):  
Bruce A. Kimball
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fund Raising ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
New Venture ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
The Law ◽  
The University

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.

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