Catch ’em Early: Making a Lawyer

2020 ◽  
pp. 37-60
Author(s):  
Emma Jones ◽  
Neil Graffin ◽  
Rajvinder Samra ◽  
Mathijs Lucassen
Keyword(s):  
Professional Identity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Evidence Base ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Training And Support ◽  
Difficult Situations ◽  
And Training

This chapter explores how a number of the issues around mental health and wellbeing faced by the legal profession can be traced back to the legal education and training provided. Drawing on an international evidence-base relating to the wellbeing of law students, it considers how the professional identity formation of many professionals begins at an early stage and often involved the absorption of potentially unhealthy norms and expectations. In particular, it explores the notion that studying and practising law has a certain status and thus those who follow this route are in some way special or different – one of the key themes identified in this study. The chapter also considers the challenges which can arise when individuals enter the profession but are not provided with adequate training and support, often facing harrowing and difficult situations and cases, but being expected to simply carry on regardless.

scholarly journals The Evolution of Lawyers' Professional Identity: The Contribution of the ADR in Legal Education

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 315
Author(s):  
Kathy Douglas
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Professional Identity ◽  
Dispute Resolution ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Legal Practice ◽  
Legal Problem ◽  
Legal Policy ◽  
Holistic Approaches

Alternative or Appropriate Dispute Resolution (‘ADR’) is a crucial area for lawyers to understand in order to engage in present day legal practice. ADR is now common in courts and the community and is supported by legal policy at both federal and state levels. Learning about ADR can contribute to the moulding of law students’ professional identity so that they are better able to engage in commonly used processes such as negotiation and mediation. This article discusses research into the teaching of ADR in legal education. It draws on a project where the teaching of ADR was researched in depth to examine the content and pedagogy of this area of the legal curriculum. The article argues that ADR is an important part of legal education as it can assist law students to develop non-adversarial, holistic approaches to legal problem-solving.

Professional Identity Formation of Early Career Music Therapists

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassandra Byers ◽  
Anthony Meadows
Keyword(s):  
Professional Identity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Professional Identity Formation ◽  
Music Therapists ◽  
Career Identity ◽  
Professional Experiences ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
And Training ◽  
Single Approach

Abstract In this study, 15 early career music therapists were interviewed about their academic, clinical, personal, and early professional experiences to define the key characteristics of their professional identity formation. Subsequent analysis of these data revealed that for these music therapists, early career identity formation was characterized by 3 developmental tasks: (1) formulating a professional identity, (2) identifying and practicing a preferred working style, and (3) moving from a single approach to practice and drawing from a variety of theories and approaches. Furthermore, their early career identity formation was characterized by 4 sequential subphases: (1) openness to change, (2) experiencing complexity, (3) freeing up, and (4) increased confidence. Barriers to healthy identity formation were also discussed. Implications for education and training, along with the importance of facilitating mentorship opportunities for early career professionals, were proposed to connect the findings to academic and professional life.

scholarly journals Becoming Global Lawyers: A Comparative Study of Civic Professionalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
John Bliss
Keyword(s):  
Professional Identity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Professional Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mapping Method ◽  
Professional Identity Formation ◽  
The Us ◽  
Corporate Lawyers ◽  
Civic Professionalism ◽  
And Training

Through their professional education and training, new lawyers are generally encouraged to adopt a civic vision of professional identity. This article explores convergences and divergences in how new lawyers entering an increasingly globalized legal profession conceive of their civic roles in different national contexts. In particular, I draw on interviews and a cross-cultural identity-mapping method to examine the lived experiences of civic professionalism among corporate-lawyers-in-training in the United States and China. I found that professional identity formation in the US sample is largely marked by role distancing and a sense of constrained public-interest expression. In contrast, Chinese respondents generally identified strongly with their civic roles, while framing their public contributions in pragmatic, state-aligned terms. I conclude with a comparative analysis of young lawyers’ bottom-up efforts to expand their civic impact.

scholarly journals Teleteaching with large groups: A case study from the Monash experience

1999 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Tennant
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Academic Staff ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
High Level ◽  
Training And Support ◽  
Large Groups ◽  
And Training ◽  
Current Practices

<span>Teleteaching, though in a relatively early stage at Monash University, has the potential to provide a conduit for high level interaction between students and staff on various campuses in 'real time'. Whilst the technology holds valuable potential, there are unresolved discrepancies between 'what can be done' and the academics' understandings and common practice of 'what is actually being done' with teleteaching. It is only through research into current practices and attitudes that an understanding will be gained of the strategies that need to be adopted to ensure that teleteaching becomes an enriching learning experience for staff and students alike.</span><p>This article focuses on the perceptions and practices of staff within the realm of current training and support. It aims to provide an understanding of difficulties experienced in the use of teleteaching, and to suggest solutions emerging from the research. To illustrate current practices and attitudes towards the use of teleteaching, this paper reports on a study conducted by Tennant (1997) into the use of teleteaching at Monash University to deliver lectures between two campuses. The paper concentrates on andragogical, interaction and training issues in teleteaching with large groups of students as seen through the eyes of both academic staff and students.</p>

scholarly journals Bringing Purposefulness to the American Law School’s Support of Professional Identity Formation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis D. Bilionis
Keyword(s):  
Professional Identity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
Law School ◽  
Professional Identity Formation ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
American Law ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Staff Experiences

Ten years after the publication of Educating Lawyers, a growing number of American law schools are taking initiative to better support their students in the formation of professional identity. There is widespread recognition that success in these efforts requires an element of “purposefulness” on the part of law faculty and staff. Experiences, environments, and pedagogies that actually work for professional identity formation must be crafted and promoted with intentionality. Bringing the requisite purposefulness to the effort, however, will take a mindset about the education of a lawyer that will be new to many in legal education. This article explores that mindset and the habits of the mind that will best serve law schools as they move forward in this area. Schools need not abandon prevailing approaches to the cognitive and skills dimensions of a law student’s education that Educating Lawyers called the first and second apprenticeships, respectively. But when it comes to the third apprenticeship of professional identity and sense of purpose, a reorientation in thinking about law students, their law school, and the educational process is necessary. That change in the way of thinking can be invigorating and empowering, revealing opportunities with time, talent, space, and experiences that have been underexplored by American legal education.

scholarly journals Divided Selves: Professional Role Distancing Among Law Students and New Lawyers in a Period of Market Crisis

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (03) ◽  
pp. 855-897 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bliss
Keyword(s):  
Professional Identity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Professional Role ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Law Firms ◽  
Education Students ◽  
Political Values ◽  
The Public ◽  
Student Cohorts

In the terms of Erving Goffman's classic role-distancing analysis, newly admitted law students often aspire to an “embraced” lawyer role that directly expresses their personal and political values. Empirical research has suggested that during law school these students are instructed in an amoral and apolitical vision of professionalism. The literature has paid less attention to how students internally experience these norms within their continual processes of self-construction. This article takes an exploratory micro-dynamic look at professional identity formation drawing on longitudinal interviews and identity mapping with three student cohorts. Over the course of their legal education, students bound for large corporate law firms tended to report increasing professional role distancing. In contrast, students who pursued jobs in the public-interest sector tended to sustain a more proximate conception of professional identity, overlapping with racial, gender, political, and other centrally constitutive roles. The article concludes with normative and theoretical implications.

Moonlighting in Law School: A Multischool Study of Part-Time Employment of Full-Time Students

1982 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 1109-1162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald M. Pipkin
Keyword(s):  
Legal Education ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Student Employment ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Full Time ◽  
School Settings ◽  
Part Time ◽  
Type Of School ◽  
And Training

The part-time employment of full-time law students is a significant aspect of contemporary legal education. Successful socialization and training in law are presumed to require the undivided time, effort, and commitment of students. Part-time employment, therefore, is commonly believed to siphon those scarce personal resources away from the central task of legal education. This multi-school study of a sample of 1,370 law students attempted to determine the significant ways in which employed students were differentiated from nonemployed classmates in finances, attitudes, and uses of time, and whether type of law school and student's year in school had effects on patterns of student employment.The incidence of part-time employment, while strongly related to personal financial resources, was found to be equally influenced by the type of school attended and year in school. While those settings varied substantially in the degree of permissiveness toward student part-time employment, students employed part time could not be distinguished statistically from their nonemployed classmates in terms of levels of involvement in law school or their levels of morale. Both temporal and attitudinal disengagement from law school were found to be commonplace among upper-class students in all school settings, but part-time employment did not appear to contribute to it uniquely.

scholarly journals “Irish Clinical Legal Education Ab Initio: Challenges and Opportunities”

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Donnelly
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Scholarly Output ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
National University

<p>This article details the incipient efforts of one Irish university law school, the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUI Galway), in the field of clinical legal education. While clinical legal education, which began in the United States some fifty years ago, has made significant advances throughout the rest of the common law world, it remains at a very early stage in Ireland.1 In fact, Irish efforts in the field to date more closely resemble what is known in the United States as the “externship model” of legal education, rather than what are commonly identified as law clinics in other jurisdictions.2 And for a variety of reasons that will be touched upon later in this article, the law school clinic is unlikely to develop here to the same extent it has elsewhere. As such, this article explores what Irish clinical legal education currently looks like and what it might look like in the future.</p><p>It begins with some background on and consideration of legal education in Ireland, then, using NUI Galway as a case study, details the emergence of skills teaching in the curriculum and the consequential increase in participation in moot court competitions and in student scholarly output. The article next examines the establishment, organisation and maintenance of a placement programme for final year law students. In so doing, it reflects on what has worked and what has not at NUI Galway from the perspectives of the clinical director, placement supervisors and students. The article concludes with some realistic, yet sanguine, observations as to what future clinical legal education has in Ireland.</p>

scholarly journals Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Contemporary Asian Reading of a Seminal Text

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-149
Author(s):  
Andra Le Roux-Kemp
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Education And Training ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Special Administrative Region ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Administrative Region ◽  
And Training

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.

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