We’ve organised student interviews with our Sim Clients (SCs) this academic year again in Osgoode Hall Law School. As before, we ran the project in the JD 1L, but this time in the first, not the second, semester. And as before we ran the project in Legal Process (subject leader Shelley Margot Kierstead, with the wonderful assistance of Sujivany Rajaratnam, Angela Yenssen and Rachael Glassman). The whole class, over 300 students, went through the experience, which was mandatory. First indications are that the feedback is as good as it was last year (see here, slides 20-21). We’ll be using SCs later in the year on a Family Law Certificate course.
I took my turn at the reception desk (no better way to find out what’s working and what’s not, re admin, workflow, SC & student responses), and an Osgoode Masters student, intrigued by the Sim Client poster at the desk, came up and asked what it was all about. I told her and she wanted to join in too. It fascinates some students, draws many others in. One student last year so regretted that she’d done poorly in the first interview that she really prepared for the second, and was exceptionally good, according to the feedback from the SC. Students I was talking to this year said they’d never believed that listening could be so hard. I asked why. Because, one said, it’s easy to listen to the client, but the problem is trying to stop the questions, similar case details, jumping to legal conclusions that ricochet (his word) around in your own head. Another said that she felt that silence was failure and she needed to fill the gap with words, but then they felt like just gap-filling for the sake of it and made her lose her way in the interview.
In 2011 Caroline Maughan and I edited a book on emotion and legal education, called Affect in Legal Education: Emotion in Learning and Teaching the Law. I wrote a chapter entitled ‘Space, absence, silence: The intimate dimensions of legal learning‘. Law and legal education is full of text and spoken words, but the most profound learning moments can be those when there is silence, either because words fail, or there is nothing to be said, or because silence is the only response, or because it’s a gentle hospitality – a welcoming of the other.