Category: professional 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, 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…

  • 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 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…

  • Teaching Legal Ethics & Developing Professional Judgment

    This is a session at ANU College of Law that I’m attending & liveblogging — see here for full details.  It was organised by Tony Foley & colleagues, and the keynote speaker is Judith Wegner from North Carolina, who in legal educational circles needs no introduction,  talking on ‘Developing Professional Judgment in Future Lawyers —…

  • Nottingham Law School, Centre for Legal Education

    I’ve accepted a position as a part-time professor in Nottingham Law School, starting this month, and concurrent with my position at ANU.  I’ll be working on research and publication projects with staff in the Centre for Legal Education (CLE) where there’s synergy with the projects that I’ll be setting up  in the Centre at ANU,…

  • European Journal of Law & Technology: BILETA special edition

    The latest issue of EJLT is out, and it’s a special edition, edited by Sefton Bloxham and me, consisting of papers from the 2012 BILETA (British & Irish Law Education Technology Association) legal education stream.  The conference was liveblogged on this blog.  Surprisingly, and against the run of recent conferences, there was a surge of…

  • Modestly big data for legal education

    The Human Face of Big Data has been splashed across screens & newsprint the last few days — see The Guardian’s excellent Datablog article, and Scientific American for summaries of what it’s about.  According to Rick Smolens, one of the two founders, it will last for two months, asks respondents 60 questions via a mobile…

  • Parallel session 2

    I attended Prof Stuart Bell (York U) and Dr Rachel Field, (Queensland U of Technology) on regulation and innovation at the academic stage. Stuart began by making the point that there was little on research on effectiveness of professional regulation in the undergraduate degree, one way or the other.  HE regulation has more of an…

  • LawTechCamp, London

    Liveblogging the above unconference, just finished my first Pecha Kucha at LawTechCamp — 20 slides, automatic 6sec per slide, new discipline for me, used to taking 5,000 words to draw breath, pretty brutal.  But you got to try it — the cool pecha-dudes did it without looking at their slides, and timed themselves perfectly.  Clearly I’ve…

  • Assessment of professional legal education

    Currently presenting at a conference organized by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. I was invited by Agusti Cerillo Martinez, the Director of the Law & Political Science Dept to speak on simulation and legal education; and I’ve focused on issues of the assessment of professional education.  I’m interested in this not least because of the…