Category: legal education

  • 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…

  • BILETA22: Day 2: Parallel session: Future Technologies

    Post-lunch, and still motoring here, though battery levels dropping.  Final parallel paper session of the conference and I’m in on the Future Tech stream, hanging on to the coat-tails of presenters’ expertise across a dizzying array of topics and technologies.  Sitting in on sessions like these when it’s not your expert area sure soaks up…

  • BILETA22: Day 2: Plenary and legal education stream

    First up, yours truly giving the second keynote, on legal education.  Slides in the usual place at the Slides tab above, and can be downloaded from Slideshare.  More of that at a later date. In the paper sessions, it’s legal education time, and Claudy Op den Kamp (Bournemouth) is first up, on ‘”Collagementary” as a…

  • BILETA22: Day 1: Digital, cloud & internet regulation & governance

    Catching up on the day job, so missed a couple of streams. First our Chair of BILETA, Abbe Brown of Aberdeen U Law Faculty.  Her paper, Regulatory creativity: Combination and coherence? explored  legal and regulatory creativity as different actors and regimes seek – directly and indirectly, deliberately and perhaps not – to draw together different…

  • BILETA22: Day 1, Digital Cultures stream

    First up is Nadia Feci and Valerie Verdoodt (KU Leuven & UGent), on the ‘Legal implications of monetising creativity on video-sharing platforms: Hobby, side-hustle or career?’ One of Nadia’s directions of research is investigating the line between professional and hobbyist in the area of user-generated videos (UGV) – typically bloggers, vloggers, influencers, game-streamers (Twitch), etc. …

  • Emerging Legal Education & Digital Games, Simulations and Learning series – five new volumes

    First of all apologies to all three of my readers who have got in touch to ask if I had departed this world or worse stopped blogging.  It’s been an unconscionable time, but I’m still hanging in there.  Been mega-busy with projects at Osgoode and my new role at Newcastle University Law School, and elsewhere…