• Day 2, session 2, UNSW legal education research conference

    This session is called ‘Face to face or online?’.  First up, Christina Do and Leigh Smith (Curtin U), on ‘The importance of f2f teaching’.  They started by noting how digital literacy was becoming more important.  Colbran’s research was cited, and points to the increasing development of online courses.   Is this a good thing, they…

  • Plenary, Carrie Menkel-Meadow: ‘Thinking or acting like a lawyer?  What we don’t know about legal education and are afraid to ask’.

    Carrie Menkel-Meadow needs no introduction.  She’s looking at six claims that things change legal education and lawyering.  Her slides are dense with information, so will do what I can to summarise the myths and their details. Myth 1: legal education = think like a lawyer. What about doctrine in CL and civil jurisdictions.  Method is…

  • Session 1, day 2, UNSW legal research conference

    This session is called ‘Technology: disrupting legal education’.  First up, Michael Adams, giving us ‘Law and technology: 20 year reflections’.  Started with a roundup of hardware.  According to him underlying pedagogy has not changed; though technology, he says has changed teaching.  Not sure I agree with that.  Mentioned LMSs, showed market placings of LMSs, mentioned…

  • Parallel session 3, day 1 UNSW legal education research conference

    This session is entitled Technology: disrupting legal education?  First, Lyria Bennett Moses, from UNSW on ‘The need for lawyers’.  I came in late (tea break…), but Lyria is talking about the use in admin law of data for machine learning and expert systems delivery of judicial roles and decisions.  Lyria teaches expert systems: key message…

  • Parallel session 2, UNSW legal education research conference

    The session I attended out of three was ‘The landscape of legal education scholarship’.  First up, Kate Galloway, Melissa Castan and Alex Steel, on ‘Towards a taxonomy of legal education research’.  I’d mentioned the subject in the keynote, and lo, there’s a paper on it, already minted.  Their SoLE Project is an examination of legal…

  • Parallel session 1, UNSW legal research conference

    First up, Tony Bradney, talking on ‘Who controls university legal education in UK’.  In contemporary E+W the value of legal education research has grown in value in a pragmatic sense.  It gives law schools a sense of what they want to do in their courses and schools.  Tony described the situation re the SQE that…

  • Legal research conference, UNSW, day 1

    I’m in Sydney for the conference on legal research at UNSW, and kindly invited by Alex Steel to give a keynote at it.  Title, not short on polysyllables – Prometheus, Sisyphus and Themis: three rival futures for legal education research.  Slides at the usual places, at Slideshare and at the Slides tab above.  I’ll be…

  • The gentle rebuke

    Yesterday I presented to faculty and students at Osgoode on the Simulated Client Initiative (SCI).  Slides at the usual place, at the Slides tab above and on Slideshare.  Lots of fascinating discussion afterwards.  To demonstrate the eight global criteria we developed at Strathclyde, and how they were used with SCs, I took the second criterion…

  • Brian Inkster in Toronto

    Am at a legal innovation roundtable sponsored by Thomson Reuters, in TR’s building, Bay St, downtown Toronto, at the invitation of Monica Goyal, an innovator and practitioner in Toronto who works with Osgoode and is the founder of Aluvion.  Brian Inkster is the guest speaker, introduced by Mitch Kowalski, a chapter in whose book The Great…

  • 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…

  • Reflection beyond ePortfolios

    This has been a crazily busy eight-day visit to Australia but so productive.  It was marked by days of intense activities and meetings and more, making connections in ANU and UNE, giving an all day workshop on simulated clients (liveblogged in a series of posts on this blog), and a seminar on the SRA’s plans…

  • 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…