It’s the motto of the Catholic secondary school I attended, St Mungo Academy (1968-1974), when it was nominally run by Marist Brothers though most of the staff were lay teachers. The previous four years I’d attended a Catholic primary boarding school, St Columba Preparatory College in Largs, where I was also taught by Marist Brothers.…
At the behest of Dr Paulina Wilson of QUB I recently wrote a short piece for the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly series called Reflections on Teaching. Around 5,000 words. Usually it takes me 5K to draw breath, so it was quite a challenge to reflect on 44 years in education, 34 of them in legal…
One of the initiatives I’ve been working on in the last 20 years is the Simulated Client Initiative. I’ve worked with a range of partners to establish SC projects internationally. I’ve also organised international workshops in London (Gray’s Inn), Canberra (ANU College of Law) and Toronto, which were liveblogged in this blog This month, people…
I’m at the two-day BILETA 2024 annual conference, held this year in Dublin, hosted by Dublin City University’s School of Law and Government. As an Honorary Vice President of BILETA I was invited by the Executive to participate in a roundtable on the newly-minted policy document, ‘A manifesto for the post-pandemic university’. The document describes…
Am at Windsor Law School, on the Detroit River, attending the CALE annual conference on legal ethics. I’m reporting on the education session which had with four presentations. Leslie Walden (Ottawa) presented on ‘Incorporating Government Lawyers into Legal Ethics Teaching’. Pooja Parmar (Victoria) gave us an interesting account of her students learning legal ethics at…
The initial LETR specification asked us to report on many areas of legal education, and under various headings regulatory relationship was part of the future reform of legal education and training. The subject was hardly addressed in earlier reports on legal education in these isles, either because it wasn’t perceived as problematic or, more likely,…
I said in my first conference post that I was hoping for the conference to help me understand LETR’s continuing significance, if any. I left with more questions in my mind about LETR’s purpose, but also a sense that what we co-authors made of it was at least in parts enduring beyond the five-year…
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…
Shameless plug alert… I’m organising the next workshop in the SLS legal education workshops series, called ‘Simulated Clients: A workshop on interdisciplinary learning and teaching in legal education’. Friday 2 June, 0950-1600, in the Common Room of the Atkin Building, City Law School, City University, London. Here’s the flyer, and an extract from it: The…
I’m attending the CLEA conference, and giving a paper with Julian Webb (slides up on the Slides tab above). Welcome and Acknowledgment of Country by David Barker, who also presented a paper giving a general summary of the history of Australian law schools from 1960 onwards. In their paper Claire Carroll and Brad Jessup examined…
We have a panel of law deans, practitioners and students to discuss legal education — Chris Gane, Michael Hor, Geraint Howells, Mike McConville, Jeremy Dein, Icarus Ho Shing Chan, Brigitte Kiu, Patricia Lam, Siegfried Sin, Justice John L. Saundersand chaired by Richard Morris. The debate is focused on ‘Navigating the (academic) law degree: are we…
In her recent visit to Australian law schools Jane Ching of Nottingham Law School, a co-author of LETR, spent a week as a Visitor at ANU College of Law, and with PEARL staff in particular. We discussed how Nottingham Law School’s Centre for Legal Education could work closely with PEARL and with other legal educational…