Now we are three: Emerging Legal Education book series

Beth Mertz and I, co-editors of the Emerging Legal Education series, have just signed a renewal of the three-year contract for this Ashgate book series on legal education.  Hardly seems like three years since we signed the first, with Caroline Maughan as the third editor (Caroline has now retired from her post at UWE, and from the series editorship).  In that time we three aimed to produce a book every year.  To date we’ve published four, with five others in the pipeline, most quite close to publication — on the subjects of corruption and legal education, Canadian legal education, globalisation and legal education, law student and lawyer well-being, and on simulation in legal education.  It’s a wonderfully eclectic mix, which is what we wanted it to be, with the focus on new, emerging and innovative forms of legal education, globally.  We guessed that people wanted to write on legal education, and just needed the right forum to do it, and we were right.

Three years on, legal education is in even more of a ferment, in most common law jurisdictions.  There’s ever more need for imagination, critical thinking, interdisciplinarity, sound scholarship and a global view of dynamic legal educational theory, cultures and practices.  More importantly, legal education is gaining as a field of serious research.  Like all relatively new research fields there are still problems of organisation and methodology (more of that in later posts), but it’s a hugely exciting field to be working in.

We’ll be continuing for the next three years, and with new projects.  Here’s the original series description –

Emerging Legal Education is a forum for analysing the discourse of legal education and creating innovative ways of learning the law. The series focuses on research, theory and practice within legal education, drawing attention to historical, interdisciplinary and international characteristics, and is based upon imaginative and sophisticated educational thinking. The series takes a broad view of theory and practice. The series books are written for an international audience and are sensitive to the diversity of contexts in which law is taught, learned and practised.

Does any part of this description catch your interest?  Do you have a book project that you want to add to the series?  Drop us a line and let us know about it.  We are very interested in hearing from scholars around the world who are studying changes, alternative perspectives, and dynamic new efforts in legal education.

Finally, I can’t leave the subject without saying a really big thank you to Alison Kirk, Commissioning Editor for Law & Legal Studies at Ashgate, who has been with us from the start and whose confidence, patience and foresight has been essential to the success of the series.