• Legal Education in Crisis? Workshop, Panel 5

    Panel 5 was a Roundtable: Research Groups on Legal Education over a working lunch.  Beth Mertz was working us hard…  Present was the Association of American Law Schools (Jeff Allum, Pablo Molina).  Pablo introduced the services and media of AALS, including the Journal of Legal Education.  Jeff introduced the Before the JD project.   Next, the…

  • Legal Education Crisis? Workshop: Panel 3

    Day two, and first up, John Bliss, ‘Becoming lawyers: mapping professional identity formation in the US and China’.  John gave an absorbing account of the reasons why students become certain lawyers, using identity maps – circles, where placing of roles and what the roles were etc, were crucial to understanding identity. Eg relations, particularly familial…

  • Legal Education in Crisis? Workshop, Panel 2

    This panel focused on exploring external and internal aspects of law schools as institutions with structures and cultures of their own.  First up, Albert Yoon, ‘Scholarship and tenure in legal academia’.   The Law Review submission process — black box process.  Most disciplines have double or single blind systems of review — not so US…

  • Legal Education in Crisis? Workshop: Intro & Panel 1

    At the behest of Beth Mertz I’m attending a two-day legal education workshop in Chicago – ‘Legal Education in Crisis? Bringing Researchers and Resources Together to Generate New Scientific Insights’.  I’ll be live-blogging the workshop.  More detail on it and the opening remarks below the fold.

  • Badges – who do we trust, and why?

    I’ve been interested in badges for a while now, and impressed with what the good folks over at Mozilla have been doing to create open badges. There’s a badge kit, discussed here, and you can carry your badges around in your backpack.  Cool stuff.

  • In their spare time

    Saw this recently on Legal Futures, one of my favourite online sources of professional legal news in E+W: Law students build app aimed at helping crime victims My eye was caught by this sentence: Mr Bull, LawBot’s founder and managing director, who is German and speaks six languages, wrote the software. So just to slow…

  • Prediction, judgment and digital technologies

    He had been told that when looking for a good oracle it was best to find the oracle that other oracles went to, but he was shut. There was a sign by the entrance saying, ‘I just don’t know any more. Try next door, but that’s just a suggestion, not formal oracular advice’. The Web Summit has…

  • Simulation – emerging from the shadows

    Roger Smith, who blogs at Law Technology and Access to Justice, invited me to contribute a post on use of digital legal education & sims – so I sketched out some context to Gina Alexandris’ earlier description a week or so ago on his blog of the use of sims in Ontario’s experimental Legal Practice…

  • Learning & teaching seminars, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law

    I’m a Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, and I spent last week giving seminars and discussing projects with staff — seminars given to first year LLB students, doctoral students, and JD/LLM students; and to staff, on webcasts, podcasts, multimedia and other digital resources. On the last subject, see…

  • SLS Conference, Legal Education, session 4 & final thoughts

    Final legal education session.We had a call-off at the last minute, so only two speakers.  First up, Melissa Hardy on her research into the third year of a three-year cohort study into the career intentions of law degree students in the context of current and proposed legal education and training reforms She started by describing her…

  • SLS Conference, Legal Education, Law Teacher Special Issue session

    This was the first session on Day 2 of the SLS Conference Legal Education section, a session devoted to the Special Issue on Learning/Technology, The Law Teacher, vol 50 issue 1 [paywall], that was published earlier this year, edited by me.  That issue, comprising six papers and discussed on this blog post, was entitled Learning/Technology because I wanted…

  • SLS Conference, session 2

    The second session started with Amanda Zacharopoulou, describing the experience of pre-arrival activities at the University of Ulster Law School She described the process of developing induction activities for students, and particularly pre-arrival activities.  Through evaluation they found: the majority of students felt confident to study law; students felt studies advisers were encouraging and supportive;…