Category: LETR

  • 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…

  • Assessment in Legal Education – new book series

    Today ANU Press has published Assessment in Legal Education. Critical Perspectives on the Scholarship of Assessment and Learning in Law. Vol 1: England.  It’s the first volume in a series, this volume edited by Alison Bone and myself.  The series editors are Craig Collins and Vivien Holmes (ANU College of Law); I’m consultant editor.  ANU Press is an…

  • Pressing problems MLR seminar, final thoughts

    The seminar organisers based the conference on a book of essays edited by Peter Birks entitled Pressing Problems in the Law. Vol 2. What are Law Schools For? and published by OUP in 1996 (hereafter, ‘Birks’). I remember buying it around 1997 or 1998, second-hand, from Voltaire & Rousseau, in Glasgow.  Five years out from…

  • Constitution, institution, foundation: a ius commune of legal education

    In a chapter I finished a while back for Catrina Denvir’s forthcoming book on Modernising Legal Education I explored what modernising the law school actually means, with case studies – hence the title, referencing Talking Heads, ‘Same as it ever was?  Second modernity, technocracy, and the design of digital legal education’.  As I point out,…

  • LETR conference: parallel papers, 2

    First up, Jenny Gibbons on ‘Curriculum as constitution’.  Fascinating analogy, which I’ve explored elsewhere.  She started with Fortnite Island.  To play the game you need to: learn the rules of the game know how to find and use yr materials take time to create safe spaces learn to maximise yr advantage in encounters learn from…

  • LETR conference: paper session 1

    First up, Steven Vaughan, by video conference, on ‘Same-same but different?  The current and future LLB offerings on law schools in England and Wales’.  He started with conversations with colleagues he had about grades and the relative difficulty of subjects, the Joint Statement (JS) and the normative hold it had on the curriculum.  Law degrees…

  • Conference: LETR – Five Years On

    The Legal Education and Training Review submitted its findings five years ago now – seems more like 15 years to be honest, so much has happened in the interim.  To mark the occasion, Jessica Guth of Leeds Law School at Leeds Beckett University has organised the above conference, taking place tomorrow.  LETR’s co-authors Julian Webb,…

  • Common entrance exams and the SQE: the wrong story

    The SQE is the Solicitors Qualifying Exam in England and Wales.  It’s an example of a common entrance examination, something a number of legal education regulators are interested in, or already practising.  I was discussing it last night in downtown Toronto, at Osgoode Professional Development, in the context of legal education generally, asking nine questions of…

  • Disintermediation and continuity

    Last year Michele Pistone and Michael Horn published an excellent piece on law schools and disruption that’s full of interesting thinking about law school futures.  It was published in the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and follows in the mainstream of Christensen’s thinking on disruption.  I agree with almost all of it.  I’m also aware…

  • BILETA 2017 final thoughts: the redress of legal education

    It was a fine conference, well organised by Anabela Susana Sousa Goncalves and her team at the Universidade do Minho.  I love Portugal.  I was brought up a Catholic, so it seemed perfectly natural to me to put a statue of St Francis holding the infant Jesus above the gantry in the hotel bar – a…

  • Afterthoughts on Legal Education in Crisis

    So a massively busy two days.  I was planning to sneak off at some point to see U of Chicago’s Laboratory Schools, and pay a quiet visit to the Dewey’s legacies there (he’s been much in my mind, being here, and I reread the late Laurel N. Tanner’s fine account before I came over), but…

  • SLS conference 2016, Legal Education section, plenary

    I was asked to give a plenary talk to the SLS Legal Education section.  I invited Dirk Rodenburg, Director of Undergraduate and Professional Programs from Queen’s University Law School, Ontario, to join me to talk about his new simulation platform as part of the presentation, and to talk about his unique blending of medical and…