First session after lunch is a continuation of the theme of clinic. First up, Kathleen Laverty, Director of Strathclyde Law Clinic, Strathclyde Law School, Glasgow. They don’t have an aim to educate students – not that that isn’t important, but social justice is the first aim and education flows from that. So the Social Justice clinic is student-run with an exec committee of 28 members. It started in 2003, with a clinical programme in 2012 (which gives students credit for the work they undertake). The clinic takes on about a third of the students who want to take the clinic. The ownership that students have of their student-run clinic increases engagement, Kate reported. Here’s the clinic structure:
Students are divided into firms headed up by a firm co-ordinator. The clinic currently has 180 volunteers from all year groups. Majority of cases are employment, followed by housing and consumer. There has been a steady rise in demand, and consequently students set up an online service that supplements the drop-in or initial advice clinic service and the full-case service. The skills involved include client interviewing, legal knowledge and teamwork. The clinic collaborates with other organisations: the Scottish Women’s Rights Centre, The Asylum Project, and Miscarriages of Justice. Students have the benefit of specialised knowledge, pooled resources, and exposure to the effects of trauma. Kate concluded by emphasising the power of student ownership, which increases commitment, leads to innovation and development. It also challenges student energy for lifetime commitment to social justice.
Next up, Tania Leiman, Assoc Prof and Dean of Law at Flinders U Law School, on professional boundaries. She crosses both academic and professional courses herself. She presented an interesting series of slides on change, the fourth industrial revolution, compounding change itself. Citing Rachael Hession’s work on professionalism in the Irish legal profession (phenomenographic study, well worth reading btw – it’s in the Law Teacher, I think), she asks, should professionalism change too? Is it defined by values of by behaviour? Is it outdated or is it transcendent? Abstract or tangible, is there a crisis of professionalism? New boundaries may need a new concept of professionalism. She posited a case study, observing that it’s about the mindset, not about the tech. Mallinckrodt – dispute about discovery and the electronic stored information production protocol. Tania points out how e-stored data and data managers are becoming more important than lawyers in the litigation process. She cited Henderson on how the legal profession effects are shrinking, and services are expanding.
Given all this, how do we equip law students to survive and thrive? What is legal education for? Well, broad education, teaching values & ethics, training in legal problem solving, academic knowledge practical legal training, CPD. But students increasingly ask – can what I do be automated, is what I’m ‘selling’ scaleable, am I still employable? Good points. She observes how constrained the Priestley 11 curriculum is, and the six threshold LOs for law – totally agree. This is the basis for the T-shaped professional, where the vertical is knowledge, the horizontal is skills (something I personally think a bizarre model). She then asks, do law teachers have the skills to teach students answers to these questions?
She outlined a new curriculum at Flinders that was experiential, included social justice forum, real clients, new skills, exposure to proprietary and open source platforms and process and administration elements. It includes traditional and digital clinical legal education, including Flinders’ Law in Action / Law in a Digital Age programme. She attributes the success of the programme to inter alia, employing people who have multidisciplinary backgrounds and skills, notably in the digital domain. She notes that much of the learning that students undergo in traditional clinical training is happening in this course, but of course with added benefits. Fascinating talk. As always, Flinders is finding a creative way forward on difficult issues.
Finally, Lindsay Ernst from the Faculty of HKU, ‘Advancing Human Rights through Experiential Learning’. The Human Rights Hub brings together HR in Practice, HR Investigation Lab, Disability Rights Clinic, Global Migration Legal Clinic, Refugee Law Clinic. She charted the development of aspects of the Hub, particularly along the lines of empowerment, community and education through community. HR documents containing rights are just that – they are statements, not enacted. Educationon human rights needs to be through human rights, and it needs to be for human rights. All this breaks down the barriers between teachers and students. She showed photos where it was hard to say who was teacher, who was student. The circle of people was community-focused in almost every way. Student comments on their experiences on the Street Law class showed that they were reflecting on precisely the transformative moment: not just legal research, not just interviewing skills, but getting to know a community of people, and seeing them as collaborators and partners. Students, community and teachers thus all feel much more empowered. All this builds inclusive communities, and as Lindsay noted, the interdisciplinary element is crucial. Great ideas.
Caffeination next. Then after the break, the session on simulation. First my keynote, slides above at the usual place, and at Slideshare. Dan Jackson of Northeastern U Law School next, on NuLawLab, which mixes design skills and arts with law. Number of law school labs are taking off in the US. In Europe it tends to be more commercially-based. In Africa & Asian, more grassroots organisations. Interesting. HKULite (Law Innovation Technology Entrepreneurship) is another example (to be discussed tomorrow). At Northeastern there’s an intensive course on law and systems design. Law and Art students, eg, worked on materials for refugees on the southern borders of the US. They created ‘trauma cards’ for people who had difficulty expressing what had happened to them. Dan is interested in deep collaborations with what might be regarded as distant disciplines – ceramics, painting. Law and its systems, after all he says, is one of the most creative things ever devised. Entirely agree.
Kris Greaves followed, exploring simulations. These are the qualities he defines as supported by sims – see below.
He cites Ebbinghaus’ curve on repetition and memory and how sims can be useful. He described online sims of an interviewing video and how that can be used to develop students’ skills and awareness. He then explored the idea of authenticity and the clustering of concepts around that (below right). He made the really good point that authenticity per se is often sited in the past, not the present or future and there needs to be care in how we develop future-oriented practices with students.
Equity and diversity also important, as is parity and equity, and the concept of automation and how automation can contradict diversity (Kris going pretty fast here in these fascinating clusters of concepts which are so useful for developing sims)
Absorbing presentation, full of information about approaches to simulation.
Next, Wilson Chow and Michael Ng of HKU Law Faculty – ‘Sim Clients are ‘live clients too! Integrating standardised clients with digital sims’ Why SCs? Because internships are not possible for all law students in HK, and there are issues in expanding clinic, in scope and scale. The SCI is therefore used as a bridge to practice. To date, at CUHK and HKU, there have been a total of 4,253 interviews carried out. I have to repeat that: 4,253 interviews carried out in Hong Kong. Incredible. They pointed out that CLE and SCI share the same goal of providing experiential lawyerin
g experiences to law students. Wilson asked us to compare the training of athletes and doctors… There is a binary division here that needs to be resolved, and Wilson is right to point it out. They described how they brought the two together in these slides.
Michael Ng pointed out how bridging the divide is important to persuade colleagues that sim clients should be part of clinical legal education. So what about transferability of skills across CLE and SCI? They showed that students who have prior SCI experience achieve better marks from clients in CLE. The same applied when students evaluated their own learning experiences. Michael concluded that SCI is a very useful and important pre-clinic training (and assessment) tool. SCI can be a part of clinical legal education, not just as building blocks or as a means to help structure or scaffold students’ learning. SCI was confirmed as an effective learning tool perceived by CLE students. There are very interesting findings indeed, and indicative of the fine research work that Wilson and Michael are carrying out in the SCI.
This was a super session. The papers by Michael and Wilson, Kris and Dan showed enormous creativity and real cutting-edge thinking about simulation and legal education. Lots more to say about this later.