I’ve been appointed to an honorary Liberty Visiting Fellowship at the School of Law, University of Leeds. I’m here working with colleagues in CIRLE, the Centre for Innovation and Research in Legal Education in the law school, and giving two seminars, chairing & presenting at a webinar, leading an early career researcher workshop and giving the CIRLE Annual Lecture, as well as taking part in other Centre activities, in the two week period from Tues 24 June to Thurs 3 July. Prof Lydia Bleasdale has put together the programme – I’m hugely grateful to her for organising the visit so well and for her welcome to the law school. Programme and abstracts are set out below; but I thought that I’d spend a few moments first trying to give some thematic overview of the activities, and why I’m giving the talks.
As background, I’m semi-retired, working two days a week remotely for OsgoodePD, and one day a week with colleagues from Manchester Met Law School, on a number of projects. Partly as a result of that work, maybe because my working life is winding down; but also observing the changing legal educational environment around us all, increasingly I’ve been concerned about a number of issues. None of them are new: they’re the ground bass to the topics of the sessions set out below. But it seems to me that they’re coming together in particularly stressful and negative ways.
The pressures legal educators are under are pretty intolerable. Often it lies beyond academics’ and their school’s ability to respond to the social complexities that result from how HE financial resources, regulation and legal education are deployed around them. On regulation for example, organisation steering has its limits, beyond which the law of unintended consequences has a disproportionate and destabilising effect on outcomes. We’ve lost sight of Goodhart’s Law. Internal systemic complexities can and too often do thwart policy reform; as can the impact of social and governance networks. The one ruling ring of professional assessment in England (SQE) erases the effectiveness of small-scale, fruitful, participatory and localised interventions in law schools; or worse still, can skew our educational practice towards mere SQE-cram. Beyond rational choice that’s really no choice at all given the dire economics of HE, the domains of values, ethical-moral choices and desired ends matter more than ever, but are having such a hard time of it.
For those of us who care about legal education, what can we do in this climate? Legal education is practical; but it’s also profoundly theoretical, jurisprudential, and involves us in deep choices about how we see ourselves as educators, and how we treat the students in our care. Action is never without at least implicit underpinning theory, but unless theory is considered thoughtfully, action will always be of little consequence. So too is theory formed without at least considering the implications it may have for action.
But it is possible to design legal education better if we discuss and explore the choices we can make, understand the research, (re-)organise what we can organise around us, perhaps also contribute to the research we’re thinking about, and above all take action – especially collaborative, informed, connective action. If my brief time here as a visitor at Leeds U is about anything, it’s about exploring aspects of that process, the theoretical and the practical.
I’m writing this post in the midst of the visit – probably the best place to start, like most stories. On Tuesday past there, we had the webinar on SIMple, the new simulation platform that I’ve been working on in Osgoode Professional Development for the past few years, with Forio, a niche simulation design firm based in San Francisco. Over two and half hours we demonstrated the new platform (Michael Bean of Forio showing the flexibility and power of the platform), and showcased + discussed the designs that were produced by German Morales (OsgoodePD) and Prof Shelley Kierstead in International Business Transactions and a Capstone course in the LLM in Canadian Common Law. Then after the break the sim designs created by Kate Stanbury (Land Law, LLB) and Chris Sykes (Professionalism in Practice in a Masters on Professionalism) at Manchester Met Law School. Webinar abstract and our collective slides below.
On Wednesday it was the turn of Dr Kryss Macleod and I to present on our project, LENA – Legal Education across the North Atlantic. Abstract and slides below. I love this project, which gives a voice to legal educators in small and micro-jurisdictions across the North Atlantic, who are so often ignored and unheard. So much to learn.
This morning, Monday 30, I gave a seminar on ‘”Online can be the privileged mode”: Navigating digital innovation in the curriculum’. Abstract and slides below. Cases studies include the first instantiation of SIMPLE back in 2007, and of course GenAI; but discussions also of the history of legal education, as well as discussions of lab + field relationships. And of our collective failing as a discipline to invite digital beyond the threshold of the law school, welcome it in, sit it beside the fire and have a good conversation with it.
On Wednesday 2 July, a workshop for PhD students and early career researchers, on The PhD and beyond: An apprenticeship model of learning and writing’. Abstract below and slides at the tab above. I’m hoping to help participants to think about ways to publication, how to write for that and related matters. Hopefully lots of discussion of our personal writing styles, what works, what we think we could improve. Finally, on the same day, I’ll be giving the CIRLE Liberty Annual Lecture, ‘Regulatory theory and legal education: command, dialectic or relational space?’ Abstract below and slides will be posted on the day before.
In addition I’m meeting one-on-one with members of staff to give advice & assistance where I can in their work on legal education and related areas. I contributed to a workshop organised by Lydia on the design of a new module that’s an innovative approach to thinking about being a student, and about being a law degree graduate. It provides students with space – away from the doctrinal aspects of the degree – to consider not only what they want to be when they graduate, but who they want to be. Very interesting work. Next week I’m attending lightning presentations by staff on their research – looking forward to that – and finally a CIRLE away day on Thursday 3 July.
So busy busy. Lydia’s put together a great programme. It’s pretty tiring; but it’s hugely enjoyable and stimulating to see the great work being done at CIRLE, and to be making a very modest contribution to it in the brief time I’m here. More as I go next week.
Titles, abstracts & slide links
Authentic fictions: Simulation in legal learning
Paul Maharg, Michael Bean (Forio), German Morales, Kate Stanbury, Chris Sykes
This webinar will focus on a web application called SIMple (SIMulated professional learning environment) – a platform designed for legal learning in law schools and beyond. It comprises a case management system and a simulation engine. The case management system enables learners to work as singletons or in groups such as virtual firms on legal matters, and to communicate with each other and with others, both real and fictional. The sim engine enables authors to design, create, test, run and archive simulations; to create fictional characters; and to make case-based and any other resources available to learners during a simulation. The platform has been designed to be highly flexible, and to support situated learning, skills learning and reflective learning. It has been designed by Osgoode Professional Development in Canada, working with Forio, a US educational web developer specialising in simulation.
During the webinar, co-hosted by OsgoodePD and the Centre for Innovation and Research in Legal Education (CIRLE) at Leeds University Law School, you will:
- See how the SIMple platform works for authors, teachers and students
- Learn about sims in two jurisdictions – Ontario and England
- Hear what students thought of the experience
- Begin to develop your own simulation plans
- Learn about the possibilities for sim collaborations across law schools, jurisdictions and disciplines
Webinar agenda
- Introduction and overview of the platform (PM + MB – 10 mins, 20 mins)
- Quick questions (10 mins)
- Sim designs and learning @ Osgoode Professional Development (GM + PM – 25 mins)
- Quick questions (10 mins)
- BREAK (15 mins)
- Sim designs @ Manchester Met Law School (KS + CS – 15 m each)
- General discussion (40 mins)
Slides
Paul Maharg intro
German Morales, International Business Transactions
Paul Maharg, Capstone, Canadian Common Law LLM
Kate Stanbury, Land Law
Chris Sykes, Professionalism in Practice
Lines of flight: Small jurisdictions, small legal educations across the North Atlantic
Kryss Macleod, Paul Maharg
Jurisdictional size is a key factor in the content, forms, cultures and literatures of legal education in every jurisdiction. But what of smaller and very small jurisdictions, which are often unregarded and forgotten in the research literature? What can they, from their size and location, contribute to contemporary debates around legal education; and what can we learn from small and micro-jurisdictions regarding the place, the potential, the creativity and the futures of legal education? Legal Educations Across the North Atlantic (LENA), is a project that sets out to explore these issues and to work towards the production of an edited book on the subject. It comprises legal educators from Nova Scotia, Greenland, Iceland, Denmark, Faroes, Scotland, N Ireland, Ireland and Wales.
Drawing upon Deleuzian approaches, it aims to:
- Provide information in the form of a comparative survey of essential aspects of practice and theory in a range of small / very small jurisdictions across the North Atlantic
- Analyse the debates surrounding present theory and praxis
- Explore what the futures of legal education hold for each jurisdiction in terms of innovation, diversity, sustainability and indigeneity.
- View through a comparative lens the place of smaller jurisdictions living in the shadows of larger, and their places in the global legal education habitus.
In this seminar we will explore several aspects of the project’s work to date, namely the relations between culture and history in small jurisdictions and the effects of larger jurisdictions upon them.
Slides
Lines of flight: small jurisdictions, etc
‘Online can be the privileged mode’: Navigating digital innovation in the curriculum.
Paul Maharg
Why is it that so many promising digital educational innovations, conceived, theorised, carefully implemented and with promising results, fail to be taken up more generally in legal education? In this seminar paper I explore the generally held notion that digital educational pilots are somehow labs that experimentally prove an intervention can succeed, which then requires to be disseminated more widely.
Almost all aspects of that process are suspect, I will argue, and the reasons why that is so involves a consideration of Bruno Latour’s analysis of Pasteur’s scientific method. For us in legal education, this involves a reconceptualization of dissemination as transformation, where educational practices developed in experimental settings require essential bridging practices if they are to become more radical, privileging modes of curriculum design and learning. I shall discuss with examples and approaches from digital legal education projects across a range of jurisdictions.
Slides
Navigating digital innovation in the curriculum
The PhD & beyond: An apprenticeship model of learning and writing
Paul Maharg
Starting out with a consideration of Swale’s concept of occluded genres in research writing and Harold Bloom’s construct of the anxiety of influence in the practice of writing, we shall open out into discussions of our personal experiences of writing and research, with the following as trigger questions:
- How original is my work?
- How will my evidence & argument be interpreted?
- Am I fitting into a canon? Challenging that canon? Creating an ‘ecology of knowledges’? How will I do that?
- Is conformism what I want at any point?
- How do I move out of apprenticeship, find my voice, join the full community?
Slides
Apprenticeship model of writing
CIRLE Annual Lecture
Regulatory theory and legal education: command, dialectic or relational space?
Paul Maharg
Legal education has undergone significant changes in every jurisdiction in the last thirty years. These include massification of HE across the globe; the assault of neo-liberalism on higher education; pressure from regulators at many levels from government downwards; new forms of professional gate-keeping; the rise of digital academia and LegalTech; chronic HE underfunding, and much more. Reform of regulation is ongoing in many jurisdictions as a result of these changes; but why does it seldom result in better, faster, cheaper regulation?
In this lecture I will argue that the standard forms of regulation of legal education require fundamental revisioning. Just as there is a Standard Conception of lawyers’ ethics that rests upon the value claims of neutrality, partisanship and non-accountability,[1] so too are there general conceptions of regulation that, in spite of much regulatory reform, still underpin generally accepted approaches to legal education regulation. These conceptions, often derived from the regulatory frameworks of other disciplines and professions, were never satisfactory when applied to legal education, and have become increasingly ill-fitting in the new environments and pressures in which legal education finds itself. Two rival forms of regulation will be analysed, and in their place I shall outline a conceptual design that, in its meta-regulatory role, may help us to achieve radical change in legal education for the better.
[1] See, eg, Webb, J. (2024). Leading Works in Legal Ethics. London, Routledge, p.3.
Slides
Regulatory theory and legal education: command, dialectic or relational space