scholarly journals CONSTITUTIONAL VALUES, THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE AND LEGAL EDUCATION IN SOUTH AFRICA: SHAPING OUR LEGAL ORDER

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elmarie Fourie
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Therapeutic Jurisprudence ◽  
Law Students ◽  
First Year ◽  
Plain Language ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
The Future

Law schools have a responsibility to remind law students that by studying law they have the power to transform thoughts, policies and lives, and that practising law is not just about financial rewards, but that its greatest reward is contributing to the betterment of society and ultimately to social change. The values and philosophies that law lecturers instil in law students can contribute to the legal order of the future; a legal order that supports a transformative South Africa. A need exists to bring legal education closer to the values enshrined in our Constitution. In addition to an extensive knowledge of legal principles, critical thinking and research skills, law students should critically engage with our constitutional values. The question remains: How do we transform legal education in South Africa? How do we change the way we teach law students? The introduction of concepts such as therapeutic jurisprudence enhanced by our constitutional values will ensure that we deliver graduates that display a commitment to our constitutional vales and an ability to engage critically with these values. It is important to establish a professional legal identity amongst students from their first year as this will assist in the development of a well-rounded graduate that can contribute to the legal order of the future. Letter writing and drafting skills, the value of plain language, moot court activities, alternative dispute resolution and clinical legal education provide opportunities to integrate valuable therapeutic jurisprudence principles into the curriculum and can allow students to critically engage with our constitutional values. By embodying these values they can improve the legal system, shape our legal order and promote progress toward an equal and free democratic society as envisaged by the Constitution.

Caste in Legal Education: A Survey of Law Schools in Delhi

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sameena Dalwai
Keyword(s):  
Legal Education ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
And Gender

This article considers the connection between legal education and imparting of justice vis-à-vis caste crimes in India. It argues that failure of law to offer justice to survivors of caste crimes is linked with the failure of legal education to offer an understanding of caste and gender to its students. From a survey of three law schools in Delhi NCR, this article raises questions about the knowledge of caste that law students possess. It examines this data in the light of what must be known and taught to the future lawyers to prepare them as unbiased and effective officers of law. The article begins with an anthology of caste crimes in the past few decades, setting off a detailed discussion on why understanding caste is imperative to justice machinery in India and hence to legal education.

scholarly journals Keeping up with change: no alternative to teaching ADR in clinic. An Australian perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Weinberg
Keyword(s):  
Dispute Resolution ◽  
Clinical Education ◽  
Alternative Dispute Resolution ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Access To Justice ◽  
Legal Practice ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Client Needs

<p>Over the last 30 years alternative dispute resolution (ADR) has become more prominent in Australian legal practice due to the need to reduce the cost of access to justice and to provide more expedient and informal alternatives to litigation. As legal educators, we need to ask: how should we be preparing law students entering practice for these changes? How can we ensure that once they become lawyers, our students will not rely entirely on litigious methods to assist their clients but instead look at alternatives for dispute resolution?</p><p>In this paper, I argue that there is no alternative to teaching ADR in clinic in order to address client needs and to ensure that students engaged in clinical education are prepared for changes in legal practice today. I show that the increasing focus upon ADR in Australian legal practice represents a challenge for law schools, and that legal educators need to ensure they are educating students about ADR.</p><p>I argue that it is important to determine whether ADR is being taught to students undertaking clinical legal education in ways that will enhance their preparation for legal practice. I will show that there is a need to explore: whether ADR is being taught within clinical legal education, the strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches, and how the teaching of ADR within clinics can be improved.</p>

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. 

scholarly journals LEGAL EDUCATION IN INDIA: PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
B. C. Nirmal
Keyword(s):  
Education Reform ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Learning Needs ◽  
Legal Service ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Service Market ◽  
Education In India ◽  
Induced Changes

This article makes some observations about legal education in India by locating it within a wider context of legal education reform that is taking place in Law Schools across the world in the wake of globalizationled and globalization-induced changes in the nature and needs of legal profession. For being both intellectually challenging and professionally relevant, legal education should be more responsible than ever before to the legal needs of the community national as well as international , and the learning needs of students to become professionally competent to play their role in an increasingly transnationalized legal service market. Any effort to restructure and reorient legal education to attain these goals will be an uphill task for any school. This article begins with exploring the implications of globalization for legal education and then turns to nature, aims and objectives of legal education. The article then looks at the possible changes required to be made in the existing curriculum for undergraduate law students in order to make the legal education more relevant and meaningful for its consumers. The focus then shifts to issues concerning methods of teaching, clinical experience and assessment of students. This article then considers issues arising from the proposal of the Bar Council of India to reduce the period of Masters programme and then builds a strong case for strengthening a research tradition in Law Schools. The focus then shifts to measures that are necessary to attract and retain better faculty and also to the regulatory role of the Bar Council of India in the field of legal education. The article concludes with some reflections on the promise of a different vision of legal education.

scholarly journals Lawyering in a Digital Age: A Practice Report on the Design of a Virtual Law Clinic at Cumbria

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Thanaraj ◽  
Michael Sales
Keyword(s):  
Core Competencies ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Access To Justice ◽  
Legal Services ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Efficient Manner ◽  
New Type

<p>This practice paper offers a modest proposition that could make law graduates more capable of serving their clients in a modernised and efficient manner. We propose that in addition to law clinics and other forms of experiential activities, law schools could add a new type of clinical component to their curriculum that teaches students to use technology to assist in the delivery of legal services. Digital lawyering skills will help law students learn core competencies needed in an increasingly technological profession, and it may help close the gap between offering access to justice by making legal services available online in the most accessible and convenient way possible and in equipping law graduates with a modernised and digital legal education. </p>

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.

Many Laws, Many Legalities

2003 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 621-622 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kercher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Privy Council ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
English Law ◽  
Made In

Peter Karsten asks why there might be a greater comparative propensity among CANZ historians than among those of the United States. Part of the reason may lie in the legal education many of us in Australia received, and in the formal legal status of many commonwealth countries until recently. As recently as the early 1970s, Australian law students were taught that English law was as significant as that made in the Australian courts. Appeals from the Australian Supreme Courts to the Privy Council were finally abolished only in 1986. From that time onward, there was a drive within the law schools to find differences from England, to look toward comparisons with other places than England.

scholarly journals Empowering The Underprivileged: The Social Justice Mission For Clinical Legal Education In India

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuvro Prosun Sarker
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Aid ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
The Social ◽  
Education In India ◽  
History Of ◽  
Clinical Models ◽  
Indian Law

<p>The 1960s and 1970s were an important time in the history of legal education in India, when the legal aid movement and various legal aid committees’ reports started to draw attention to the importance of experiential learning, or learning on the job, in legal education. The main aim of involving law students in the national legal aid movement was to make them feel more responsible for the considerable part of the Indian population who, because of their socio-economic status, couldn’t access justice. The history of how India’s clinical programs were introduced has a lot in common with the history of clinical programs in other parts of the world. There was a desire to create a pool of lawyers, who would serve as soldiers in the fight for social justice for underprivileged groups in the country.</p><p>While some prestigious universities started their clinical programs in the 1970s, most of the regulators of legal education took a long time to include clinical papers in the curriculum. In 1997 the Bar Council of India introduced four practical papers in the curriculum. The spirit of public service, and the widespread poverty in a country, has always been central to the push for clinical programs everywhere. But in India, the legal aid committees’ and other statutory bodies’ reports calling for clinical programs to support social justice, were always ignored. The National Knowledge Commission’s working group on legal education specifically mentioned the need to introduce students to issues relating to poverty, social change and social exclusion, through clinical legal education.</p><p>After the introductory section, the second section discusses the introduction of clinical programs with their roots in the search for social justice in the United States and India. The third section discusses the continuous deliberation by various bodies, commissions and committees about the need to introduce clinical programs with a social justice perspective in India. The fourth section discusses the social justice-based clinical programs in China and South Africa. This section tries to highlight some of the clinical models focused on serving underprivileged groups, that have been introduced and implemented in these two countries and which ~ after local modifications ~ could serve as a template for programs in Indian law schools. The fifth section tries to search for clinical models best suited to India with reference to clinical programs in China and South Africa. Several examples of clinical activities in a few Indian law schools have been highlighted in this chapter to explain these models’ effectiveness and suitability for Indian circumstances. The sixth section sets out some suggestions for law schools and stakeholders of legal education in India as to how to further the country’s social justice mission of clinical legal education.</p>

scholarly journals The financial challenges of clinical legal education: an example from a Zagreb law clinic

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Preložnjak ◽  
Juraj Brozović
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Curriculum Reform ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
Financial Sustainability ◽  
Legal Aid ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Financial Challenges

<p class="Body">Authors lay out the debate over the composition and direction of legal education in an era of law school’s curriculum reform and limited financial resources. Croatian Legal Aid Act created an opportunity for law students to become more actively involved in delivering primarily legal aid to local community. If law schools are not sufficiently financially resourced, they can hardly equip students with the needed skills to practice law and provide legal aid. Finally, the authors argue who should play a guiding role in financing a clinical legal education in law schools that are focused on educating students as social justice lawyers.</p><p class="p0">Keywords: clinical legal education, legal aid, financial sustainability </p>

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