scholarly journals Legal Education in the Next Future

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 3-24
Author(s):  
Laura Bugatti
Keyword(s):  
Vocational Training ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Professional Services ◽  
Working Environment ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Competition Rules ◽  
The Law

The legal profession is facing a new working environment marked by increasing globalisation, competition, technological advances and deregulation. Furthermore, the economic perspective imposed by the European Union – which leads us to consider lawyers as business as well as professionals – is having a profound impact on national regulations. Nobody would doubt that the intellectual professions have experienced a deep transformation whereas competition rules – originally addressing more traditionally commercial ventures – have begun to penetrate in this different area. In this time of changes, the ‘qualitative entry restrictions’ – taking the form of minimum periods of education (and related educational standards), post-university vocational training and professional examinations – are maintaining a key role: ensuring that only practitioners with appropriate qualifications and competence can supply their legal services in the internal market.The first part of this paper is devoted to analysis of the evolution and changes involving legal education in European countries, adopting a comparative and historical perspective. Member states have the right to regulate professional services, and they have the primary responsibility of defining the framework in which professionals operate; therefore, regulation of legal education is, first and foremost, a national matter. Nevertheless, a historical overview of the different systems shows that even if the starting points of the different traditions are very distant, sometimes even opposite, there are some common trends in the evolution that are going to create a harmonization in the field of legal education. In particular, every system is going to create a pathway to enter in the legal profession that ensures both academic studies and professional training, combining the theoretical knowledge with practical aspects.The second part of the paper focuses on the new role embraced by the law schools, arguing that the new mission of law schools is, at least in part, to contribute to the creation of legal practitioners. In fact, it seems that the division between exclusively academic theoretical study and post-university vocational training is today unsustainable. Considering the law schools’ new obligation to create both ‘theoretic and practical’ scholarship and the consequent shift towards more skills-based legal education, the second part of the paper will be devoted, in particular, to the analysis of the fundamental role that clinical legal education should play in this process of reform.

scholarly journals The Legal Academy’s Engagements with Lawtech: Technology Narratives and Archetypes as Drivers of Change

2019 ◽  
pp. 27-45
Author(s):  
Kate Galloway ◽  
Julian Webb ◽  
Francesca Bartlett ◽  
John Flood ◽  
Lisa Webley
Keyword(s):  
Curriculum Design ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Access To Justice ◽  
Legal Services ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Services Delivery ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
The Law

This article argues that legal education is currently grappling with three narratives of technology’s role in either augmenting, disrupting or ending the current legal services environment. It identifies each of these narratives within features of curriculum design that respond to legal professional archetypes of how lawyers react to lawtech. In tracing how these influential narratives and associated archetypes feature in the law curriculum, the article maps the evolving intersection of lawtech, the legal profession and legal services delivery in legal education. It concludes by proffering the additional narrative of ‘adaptive professionalism’, which emphasises the complex and contextual nature of the legal profession, and therefore provides a more coherent direction for adaptation of the law curriculum. Through this more nuanced and grounded approach, it is suggested that law schools might equip law graduates to embrace technological developments while holding on to essential notions of ethical conduct, access to justice and the rule of law.

Reforming Legal Education through Clinical Pedagogy: Legal Education in Palestine

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-169
Author(s):  
Mutaz M. Qafisheh
Keyword(s):  
Education System ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Solid Base ◽  
Legal Aid ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
The Future

This article introduces the modern legal education scene in Palestine, by sharing the experience in setting up and running the clinical programmes of Hebron University. The article pursues a comparative approach by reviewing models of successful clinical programmes in various countries and by shedding light on the existing clinics at Hebron University. It warns, however, that despite achievements, the future of clinical pedagogy in the country remains uncertain. It may take years for clinics to build a solid base within the legal education system. Law schools have yet to develop a clear place for clinics within the curricula. The writer argues that the capacity of clinics to advance legal education, complement the apprenticeship stage, strengthen the legal profession and become a legal aid provider is unbounded. Building a coherent clinical system that is parallel to the systems of professional training, law practice and legal aid will require other reforms.

The Legal Profession: The Training and Literature of Law

2019 ◽  
pp. 591-616
Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Law School ◽  
College Degree ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
The Law ◽  
Law Degree ◽  
College Or University

This chapter discusses changes in the legal profession in the second half of the nineteenth century, covering the rise of the law school, the literature of the law, and legal periodicals and casebooks. No state in the nineteenth century made a law degree, or a college degree, a prerequisite for admission to the bar. Many lawyers, however, even in the 1850s, did go to college, and more and more students who could afford it chose law school as well. Indeed, by 1900 it was quite clear that the law schools would come to dominate legal education. After the Civil War, an increasing number of law schools formed some sort of tie with a college or university. More than three-quarters of the schools open and running in the 1890s were of this type.

Law School Accreditation Standards and the Structure of American Legal Education

1978 ◽  
Vol 3 (03) ◽  
pp. 515-543 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna Fossum
Keyword(s):  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
The Past ◽  
Accreditation Standards ◽  
History Of ◽  
Part Time ◽  
The Law ◽  
School Accreditation

In the past 50 years, eligibility for admission to the bar has come to depend increasingly on the accreditation status of the law school attended. The author traces the history of the American Bar Association's law school accrediting standards and their impact on part-time and proprietary law schools, presents the results of a study of the ABA standard prohibiting the accreditation of proprietary law schools, and discusses ramifications for legal education and the legal profession.

scholarly journals Blackface, Bullying and Freedom of Expression: What Legal Education Means for Law Student Welfare

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Samuel V. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Student Mental Health ◽  
Student Safety ◽  
The Law ◽  
Law Student

Today, law student safety is a serious but often missed objective in American law schools. According to a recent survey, the typical American family wants to know their law student is safe even more than they want their law student to acquire a first-rate legal academic experience. Despite the importance of law student mental health to student performance, and cultural objectives unique to legal education, law students are not only highly vulnerable to acquiring mental health challenges during law school but are prone to be overlooked, and perhaps blamed or condemned for their mental health challenges, albeit unintentionally. My work asserts that despite the chief objective of law schools being to educate knowledgeable, competent, legal professionals, and provide them with the necessary skills to resolve complex legal essentials for corporations and government, as well as advance social justice, and to promote equal treatment for all, inherent in the nature of legal education, is a seemingly widely accepted risk of compromising law student mental health. Relying on qualitative studies and journalistic reports, my work will demonstrate that law students experience high incidents of personal depression, anxiety, extreme sadness, loss of interest or desire, feelings of guilt or low self-esteem, disturbed sleep or appetite, low energy, poor concentration, and a myriad of other mental and physical calamities, all of which greatly exceeds that of the law faculty, and surpasses levels experienced by medical and graduate students at American schools of higher education. My work further acknowledges that law student anxiety and depression are inextricably linked to the rigorous academic demands of legal education. Still it argues and set forth that law student mental health is related to avoidable conditions and patterns in the law school environment that enable or fail to account for the law student’s inexperience with coping with intense stress, emotional uncertainty, geographical isolation from loved ones, strained financial resources, poor job prospects, family strife, drug or alcohol abuse, homelessness, or lack of a culturally responsive learning environment. Granted, the legal profession is not for everyone. My work argues that law schools cannot turn a blind eye to the plight of law students as if no degree of accountability and responsibility lies with the law school. Indeed, law schools, albeit unintentionally, may be some of the chief investors in patterns of conduct that compromise the physical, emotional, and mental safety of law students. Recognition of a law school’s duty to students, in my view, requires law schools to resist the rhetoric of self-exceptionalism. Law schools, have an obligation, reluctantly or not, to concretely curtail repeated patterns of professional abuse, neglect, dereliction of academic duties, social domination, and student exploitation, that are uniquely embedded in the culture of legal education. Simply put, law student safety needs, coupled with the intricacies and unforgiving consequences of today’s competitive legal job market and high cost of legal education, warrant that law schools resist the impulses that prioritize institutional-preservation and subordinate student mental health under the guise of teaching students the harsh realities of the legal profession and preparing them for legal practice. My work argues that student physical, emotional, mental and academic safety should, and must become a critical component of legal education.

scholarly journals Toward a Rule of Law Society in Iraq: Introducing Clinical Legal Education into Iraqi Law Schools

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haider Ala Hamoudi
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
The Law

23 Berkeley Journal of International Law (BJIL) 112 (2005)This Article details my experience introducing clinical legal education into three Iraqi law schools. I highlight some of the cultural, legal and logistical obstacles that existed, and the means my colleagues and I used to circumvent them. By and large we considered our project at least modestly successful and certainly garnered the interest of many faculty and nearly all students who participated. Nevertheless, the extent of our success depended largely on the cooperation of the faculty and administration at the law schools with which we worked, and we were able to achieve the most at those institutions where cooperation was highest. Unfortunately, however, our project was limited necessarily in both scope and duration, and further efforts must be undertaken in order for experiential legal education to gain a firmer foothold in Iraq.

9. Delivering legal services: practitioners, adjudicators, and legal scholars

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Partington
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Private Colleges ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Legal Services ◽  
Legal Practice ◽  
Legal Advice ◽  
The Law

This chapter discusses the role both of those professionally qualified to practise law—solicitors and barristers—and of other groups who provide legal/advice services but who do not have professional legal qualifications. It examines how regulation of legal services providers is changing. It notes new forms of legal practice. It also considers how use of artificial intelligence may change the ways in which legal services are delivered. It reflects on the adjudicators and other dispute resolvers who play a significant role in the working of the legal system. It reflects on the contribution to legal education made by law teachers, in universities and in private colleges, to the formation of the legal profession and to the practice of the law.

Innovation and Disruption: Exploring the Potential of Clinical Legal Education

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-32
Author(s):  
Mary Anne Noone
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Law School ◽  
Access To Justice ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Government Decision ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Clinical Program ◽  
Real Challenge

It’s a great privilege to deliver this year’s Susan Campbell Oration. I, like many others, had the pleasure of working with Sue on a range of activities. In 2007, Sue conducted a review of the La Trobe Law School Clinical program which was instrumental in helping ensure the program remained an integral aspect of the La Trobe University law course. I hope what I have to say honours Sue’s memory and her contributions to legal education and clinical legal education in particular2.  My focus in this presentation is on how Australian clinical legal education responds to the various innovations and disruptions occurring in the legal arena. The scope and breadth of innovations is mindboggling. There are many predictions about what the future holds for the legal profession, from gloom and doom to utopia, and there is a growing body of literature discussing the implications for the legal profession and legal education. In reality, it is impossible to envisage what the legal world will look like in ten years let alone thirty and that poses a real challenge for those involved in legal education, including clinical legal education. How best to prepare today’s students for the unknown future?  Given that I have no expertise in digital technology and am certainly not a futurologist my comments relate to those areas about which I have some background: access to justice, social security and clinical legal education.  I briefly outline the variety and scope of innovations occurring in the legal world, discuss two related aspects namely access to justice and government decision making, using the example of Robodebt, and then examine the potential for clinical legal education in these disruptive times. I argue that clinical legal education is well placed to take a more central role in Australian law schools and the training of 21st century legal workers. 

scholarly journals Some Thoughts on a More Humanist and Equitable Legal Education

1995 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 920
Author(s):  
A. Wayne MacKay
Keyword(s):  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Critical Step ◽  
Important Challenge

This article starts with the premise that all teaching is a communication of values between student and teacher. An important challenge in confronting law is making it more inclusive and equitable. A critical step in this process is first recognizing one's own biases. Only then will genuine dialogue about the inherent biases in the legal profession and in law schools be possible. Making law schools more inclusive entails not only superficial changes, but an examination of what is taught, how it is taught and how students are evaluated.

scholarly journals Law Clinics and Access to Justice in Kenya: Bridging the Legal Divide

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 107
Author(s):  
Yohana Ouma ◽  
Esther Chege
Keyword(s):  
Critical Role ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Access To Justice ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
The Law

<p>Despite the existence of law schools in Kenya, there has been a low uptake of clinical legal education generally and the setting up of law clinics in particular. Given the critical role that law clinics play in clinical legal education, the lack of well-established law clinics has negative implications of clinical legal education as well as the role that law schools, through law clinics, play in promoting access to justice. While the various law schools in Kenya undertake various activities that ideally fall under a law clinic, there has been a lack of institutionalization of law clinics. This has in turn limited the scope end effectiveness of the law clinics both in terms of their efforts to promote access to justice and clinical legal education. The paper argues that in order for this to be rectified, there is need to institutionalise law clinics within the various law schools in the country. Only then will they be more effective in promoting access to justice as well as clinical legal education. </p>

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