Category: legal education

  • WG Hart, day 2, session 2

    Parallel session: Pat Leighton, The LLB as a liberal degree? A re-assessment from an historical perspective.  There’s been a failure to develop a coherent and robust LLB in law schools.  We need to explore the culture of what we teach, how we teach it.  Pat focuses on the LLB, its history and culture.  She has…

  • WG Hart, day 2, session 1

    And here we are for day 2 of the Workshop, with Rick Abel’s plenary on legal education.  No slides, just words, all of them the right ones, and in the right order too, witty and to the point — ‘You never want a serious crisis to go to waste’: reflections on the reform of legal…

  • WG Hart, session 4

    Avrom’s working us hard…  Fourth session, and Julian Lonbay on What can be learned about legal educational standards from the European dimension.  Given Bologna and Lisbon processes, and the Morgenbesser case (which has increased the fee movement and the concomitant assessment load on Bars and Law Societies), and the newly revised professional qualification Directive (in…

  • WG Hart, session 3

    First up, Wes Pue, highly engaging session on Professional innovation in three frontier towns: Toronto, 1820, Birmingham, 1860, Winnipeg, 1920.  Wes’ paper counters the view that innovation only derives from metropolitan centres.  From his abstract: ‘the perspective of professional history from the ‘frontier’ dislocates more conventional histories ‘from the centre’, permitting the opening of enquiries…

  • WG Hart Workshop – opening address & law in context session

    Am at the WG Hart Workshop, IALS, liveblogging.  Entered the lecture theatre to Harry Arthurs appearing virtually from Canada.  Vintage Arthurs, but have I come to the wrong conference?  No, Avrom is upfront, and all the usual suspects in the audience.  Harry states a fundamental opposition between academy and profession, emphasising distinguished scholarship over skills…

  • Shared space: regulation, technology and legal education in a global context

    Abstract for my BILETA 2014 legal education session below.  Slides up on the Slides page of this site: The LETR Report on legal services education and training (LSET), published in June 2013, is the most recent of a series of reports dealing with legal education in England and Wales.  Many of these reports do not…

  • Our data: free and open-access

    Recently I was trawling a publisher’s website for a technology article (Springer, since you ask), with no-access pages and tariff barriers all around me, when a cheeky wee popup asked me: Would you use a data collaboration website to share your research data with colleagues? Yes, publicly Yes, but only privately No I don’t have…

  • Now we are three: Emerging Legal Education book series

    Beth Mertz and I, co-editors of the Emerging Legal Education series, have just signed a renewal of the three-year contract for this Ashgate book series on legal education.  Hardly seems like three years since we signed the first, with Caroline Maughan as the third editor (Caroline has now retired from her post at UWE, and…

  • Research skills: a failure of imagination

    Thanks to Kristoffer Greaves for pointing me in the direction of the recent workshop on Teaching Research Skills to Law Students, summarised in Jenni Carr’s HEA Social Science blog.  I’m in Canberra now, so couldn’t make the workshop, but Rosemary Auchmuty, who authored the posting, has done a good job in pulling together the slides…

  • LETR and legal education research infrastructure

    The LERN event earlier this month, part of which I summarised here, picked up on the LETR call for more and better research into legal education.  The LETR report was tasked to be evidence-based, and thus to inform the second phase of LETR which we are now in.  As we pointed out, though, the literature needs…

  • LETR read, misread, unread

    I’ve been at three LETR-related events the last couple of weeks — the seminar at UCL on Legal Innovation — How Should the Educators Respond,   a SLS/IALS event, The Role of Academics in Legal Education & Training, and a LERN event — After the LETR, what should we be researching and how.  I was speaking…

  • LETR now public

    As of midday today, the Legal Education & Training Review has gone public.  More comment later.  See the Executive Summary for headline findings and recommendations; and the website contains the full Report in HTML and PDF formats (mobi & epub formats to follow), briefing papers, discussion papers, open submissions data, the literature review and a…