This collection brings together a distinguished group of researchers to examine the power relations which are played out in university law schools as a result of the different pressures exerted upon them by a range of different 'stakeholders'. From students to governments, from lawyers to universities, a host of institutions and actors believe that law schools should take account of a vast number of (often conflicting) considerations when teaching their students, designing curricula, carrying out research and so on. How do law schools deal with these pressures? What should their response be to the 'stakeholders' who urge them to follow agendas emanating from outside the law school itself? To what extent should some of these agendas play a greater role in the thinking of law schools?
An urgent plea for much needed reforms to legal education The period from 2008 to 2018 was a lost decade for American law schools. Employment results were terrible. Applications and enrollment cratered. Revenue dropped precipitously and several law schools closed. Almost all law schools shrank in terms of students, faculty, and staff. A handful of schools even closed. Despite these dismal results, law school tuition outran inflation and student indebtedness exploded, creating a truly toxic brew of higher costs for worse results. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the subsequent role of hero-lawyers in the “resistance” has made law school relevant again and applications have increased. However, despite the strong early returns, we still have no idea whether law schools are out of the woods or not. If the Trump Bump is temporary or does not result in steady enrollment increases, more schools will close. But if it does last, we face another danger. We tend to hope that crises bring about a process of creative destruction, where a downturn causes some businesses to fail and other businesses to adapt. And some of the reforms needed at law schools are obvious: tuition fees need to come down, teaching practices need to change, there should be greater regulations on law schools that fail to deliver on employment and bar passage. Ironically, the opposite has happened for law schools: they suffered a harrowing, near-death experience and the survivors look like they’re going to exhale gratefully and then go back to doing exactly what led them into the crisis in the first place. The urgency of this book is to convince law school stakeholders (faculty, students, applicants, graduates, and regulators) not to just return to business as usual if the Trump Bump proves to be permanent. We have come too far, through too much, to just shrug our shoulders and move on.
Privatising the Public University: The Case of Law is the first full-length critical study examining the impact of the dramatic reforms that have swept through universities over the last two decades.
This edited collection offers a critical overview of the major debates in legal education set in the context of the Lord Upjohn Lectures, the annual event that draws together legal educators and professionals in the United Kingdom to consider the major debates and changes in the field. Presented in a unique format that reproduces classic lectures alongside contemporary responses from legal education experts, this book offers both an historical overview of how these debates have developed and an up-to-date critical commentary on the state of legal education today. As the full impact of the introduction of university fees, the Legal Education and Training Review and the regulators’ responses are felt in law departments across England and Wales, this collection offers a timely reflection on legal education’s legacy, as well as critical debate on how it will develop in the future.
Clinical legal education (CLE) is potentially the major disruptor of traditional law schools’ core functions. Good CLE challenges many central clichés of conventional learning in law—everything from case book method to the 50-minute lecture. And it can challenge a contemporary overemphasis on screen-based learning, particularly when those screens only provide information and require no interaction. Australian Clinical Legal Education comes out of a thorough research program and offers the essential guidebook for anyone seeking to design and redesign accountable legal education; that is, education that does not just transform the learner, but also inculcates in future lawyers a compassion for and service of those whom the law ought to serve. Established law teachers will come to grips with the power of clinical method. Law students struggling with overly dry conceptual content will experience the connections between skills, the law and real life. Regulators will look again at law curricula and ask law deans ‘when’?
The internationalization of commerce and contemporary life has led to a globalization of legal standards and practices. The essays in this text explore this new reality and suggest ways in which the new legal order can be made more just and effective.
This book is devoted to complex questions of building and developing legal education in more than one language, through two state languages (French and Dutch in Belgium, German and French in Switzerland, English and French in Canada, Finnish and Swedish in Finland) and/or through the medium of minority or lesser used languages (Basque, Galician, Catalan, Welsh, Romanian). Some states have a long and well-established tradition of bilingual legal education; others have only recently started to develop a legal education system through non-dominant languages; finally, in some other cases only partial bilingual legal education obtains, rather than a fuller model. The volume purports to examine best practices and to draw useful lessons from the experiences of other bilingual societies.
