Am at Windsor Law School, on the Detroit River, attending the CALE annual conference on legal ethics. I’m reporting on the education session which had with four presentations. Leslie Walden (Ottawa) presented on ‘Incorporating Government Lawyers into Legal Ethics Teaching’. Pooja Parmar (Victoria) gave us an interesting account of her students learning legal ethics at UVic entitled ‘The West Coast is the Best Coast: Legal Ethics at UVic’. Listening to her, I was thinking that the topic of her paper should be a permanent fixture for the education session, where we hear from different ethicists across Canada on how they teach – maybe the accounts could be summarized and published on the CALE website. Me next on ‘Simulated Client: A Portrait of the Ethics Tutor as Outsider’. Slides are up at Slideshare and on the Slides tab above. Finally a fascinating session by another Osgoode pair, Heidi Matthews & Ian Stedman, entitled ‘Student Podcasting in Ethical Lawyering’.
In questions, I noted the parallels between podcasting, structure and content, and the 3-400-word client bulletins we asked students to undertake in the ALIAS project in Ardcalloch (described briefly here). There was a difference though. Where Heidi and Ian reported that students seemed to produce the podcasts effortlessly, this wasn’t the case with the client bulletins. The first year we ran ALIAS we discovered that students were producing compressed 2,000 word essays, complete with footnotes and citations – they’d been socialized into producing this by four years of undergraduate legal study. So the second year, we introduced a Professional Support Lawyer from a law firm called (then) McGrigors together with the firm’s web editor, who both discussed with students how to turn turgid legal text into reader-based, client-friendly articles. Students found this so helpful that we webcast the two for future generations of students.
I also noted two convergences. First, both projects (ie Heidi and Ian’s podcasting project, and the Ardcalloch client bulletin project), which appear to be tangential to mainstream legal education content and structure, actually embodied core skills and content, and were excellent examples of student agency and engagement. Second, they are examples of the digital New Rhetorics that we need to develop, what I’m calling a post-Ciceronian rhetorics, where text merges with audio and video, and where lawyers are in situations where they need to address a broad range of audiences across different channels and multiple media platforms.
Richard Devlin wondered if the first semester of 1L was the place for podcasting, and wouldn’t it be better placed when students had had more knowledge of legal content. Heidi and Ian answered, pointing to the helpfulness of socialization: students came together to work on a question, and the experience gave them confidence in their abilities. I answered Richard’s good question too, and said that Heidi’s and Ian’s podcasting project might be a project that starts in 1L and to which students return in the widening gyres of a spiral curriculum in later years. The same goes for ALIAS. And of course for sim clients too. Start early, build gradual expertise, integrate skills & knowledge & values together. Make it habitual.
It all goes back to Dewey, whose extensive learning theories included a triangular relationship between habit, impulse and intelligent thought. Habit is essential to learning – indeed to the maintenance of a sense of self in the world.[1]And as I point out in the Introduction to Transforming Legal Education:
Three aspects of habit are important. First, according to Dewey habits are not formed by repetition (since ‘the ability to repeat can only be the result of the formation of a habit’); secondly, because action is always transaction, the trigger for habits does not lie only in the external environment; and thirdly, habits give meaning to our environment, in the sense that experiential learning leads to more differentiated meaning in the world. The world thus moves from being – in terms redolent of James (Henry, not William) – ‘a vast penumbra of vague, unfigured things’ to becoming a Deweyan ‘a figured framework of objects’.
Really good ethics conference – outside the education session, there were super papers so far by Brooke Mackenzie (‘Regulation of Lawyer Advertising in Light of LSO Jurisprudence’), Noel Semple (‘Regulation of Time-based Legal Fees’), and Richard Devlin (‘Disciplining Judges: Contemporary Controversies and Challenges’).
- [1]As Dewey pointed out, ‘[w]ere it not for the continued operation of all habits in every act, no such thing as character could exist. … Character is the interpenetration of habits’ (MW, 14, p. 18).↩