Category: legal education

  • Teaching ≈ Learning ≈ Regulation

    At the behest of Dr Paulina Wilson of QUB I recently wrote a short piece for the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly series called Reflections on Teaching. Around 5,000 words. Usually it takes me 5K to draw breath, so it was quite a challenge to reflect on 44 years in education, 34 of them in legal…

  • Mergers & collaborations

    Mergers & collaborations are in the air, again.  A while back City St George’s president Anthony Finkelstein, aka prof serious, recommended consolidating providers to improve the HE sector’s finances.  The merger of the universities of Kent and Greenwich into the London & South East Group has been approved by the Dept for Education.  They’re one…

  • Panel session: The Role of AI and Legal Education, Westminster U Law School

    A couple of weeks ago I spoke on a panel session at a one-day conference organised by Westminster U Law School – The Role of AI and legal education: Preparing the Next Generation of Lawyers.  I was on annual leave at the time, in Florence, so attended only the panel not the whole conference, but…

  • Happy anniversary, blog

    Since I seem to be thinking about things past more than present or future at the moment, before this year’s end I want to mark the 20th anniversary of my blog.  I started in 2005, around January, I think, on Blogger.  Felt uneasy with the platform though, so quickly moved to Typepad, which was then…

  • My first experience of digital education

    After I finished my Arts doctoral thesis and Education qualifications, and before I turned to Law, I worked as a part-time tutor in the Eng Lit dept at Glasgow University.  I kept in touch with my medieval tutor, Des O’Brien, who was an extraordinary polymath.  In 1987 he obtained a grant from the Computers in…

  • Simulated Client workshop summary

    The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson once observed that if you wish to understand a culture, study its nurseries. There is a similar principle for the understanding of professions: if you wish to understand why professions develop as they do, study their nurseries, in this case, their forms of professional preparation. When you do, you will generally…

  • Sim client workshop: programme and resources

    One of the initiatives I’ve been working on in the last 20 years is the Simulated Client Initiative. I’ve worked with a range of partners to establish SC projects internationally. I’ve also organised international workshops in London (Gray’s Inn), Canberra (ANU College of Law) and Toronto, which were liveblogged in this blog This month, people…

  • BILETA 2024: Legal education manifesto

    It was billed in the conference programme as the launch of the BILETA online teaching policy. But the document is more subtle and radical than this: a BILETA manifesto; not teaching-focused but learning-centred; not just online but education in the round. Why a manifesto, why now? There was a feeling that post-pandemic, with the drift…

  • BILETA 2024: Legal education session 1

    Four papers. First up, Nick Scharf from East Anglia U, on an intriguing interdisciplinary topic: ‘Give the Drummer Some: Reflecting on the use of the drum kit to enhance student learning of copyright law’. As he describes it in his abstract ‘The approach outlined here breaks from the traditional question/answer/discussion structure of seminars and allows…

  • BILETA 2024

    I’m at the two-day BILETA 2024 annual conference, held this year in Dublin, hosted by Dublin City University’s School of Law and Government. As an Honorary Vice President of BILETA I was invited by the Executive to participate in a roundtable on the newly-minted policy document, ‘A manifesto for the post-pandemic university’. The document describes…

  • Redivivus

    To all three of my readers, apologies for my disappearance over the past year and more. Many things intervened, including job changes, illness, house moves ending up here on the Isle of Skye; the acquisition of a giant collie and a motorbike (more of which anon), the renewal of old acquaintances, Hannah Arendt, Adam Ferguson…

  • SC Workshop: Final plenary

    First, a word about the two sessions that weren’t recorded, namely the demo interview with Alexis Callen as lawyer and Dana Mohr as SC, and the panel: Alexis, Dana, Joan Rilling.  Alexis did exceptionally well as a 1L lawyer, and Dana was first rate at enacting the client, and then switching into feedback mode with…