Legal Education: Teaching and Learning Law

This text, the first full-length book study of the subject, seeks to make emotion a central topic of research for legal educators, and restore the power of emotion in our teaching and learning. Part 1 focuses on the contribution that neuroscience can make to legal learning, a theme that is carried through other chapters in the book. Part 2 explores the role of emotion in the working lives of academics and clinical staff, while Part 3 analyses the ways in which emotion can be used in learning and teaching.

The book covers different aspects of law teaching from the law teacher’s perspective. Topics include the goals of law teaching, the factors that lead to successful law teaching, different ways of preparing for in-class success, face-to-face versus online teaching, the in-class teaching experience, assessments, teaching evaluations, the design of new courses and programmes, the importance of teaching administration, and the future of law teaching in the digital age.

The Assessment in Legal Education book series offers perspectives on assessment in legal education across a range of Common Law jurisdictions. The series will be useful for those seeking a summary of the assessment issues facing academics, students, regulators, lawyers and others in the jurisdictions under analysis. The exemplars of assessment contained in each volume may also be valuable in assisting cross-jurisdictional fertilisation of ideas and practices. This first volume focuses on assessment in law schools in England.

An exploration of what design can do for legal education. In recent decades design has increasingly come to be understood as a resource to improve other fields of public, private and civil society practice; and legal design—that is, the application of design-based methods to legal practice—is increasingly embedded in lawyering across the world. It brings together experts from multiple disciplines, professions and jurisdictions to reflect upon how designerly mindsets, processes and strategies can enhance teaching and learning across higher education, public legal information and legal practice.

Whilst educational theory has developed significantly in recent years, much of the law curriculum remains content-driven and delivered traditionally, predominantly through lecture format. This book draws on the experience of teachers, practitioners and students across the world who are committed to developing a more effective learning process.

Subverting the narrative that the legal profession must be austere and controlled, this prescient How To guide addresses the crucial need for holistic, trauma-centered law teaching. It advocates for a healthier, more inclusive profession by identifying strategies to engage, and even encourage, emotions within legal education. Proponents of trauma-centered pedagogy, co-editors Mallika Kaur and Lindsay M. Harris bring together a diverse set of legal academics from a range of subject areas to examine the need for trauma-centered pedagogy. Diverse subject matter experts, clinical and non-clinical, critically analyse a multitude of educational techniques within the law classroom, including the use of violent imagery, simulation, and the Socratic method. Chapters explore pedagogical methods that consider the emotional responses of the professor and student, advocating for more attentive and sensitive methods of teaching law. Courses which address stereotypically emotive topics such as domestic violence law are considered along with courses usually deemed non-emotional such as civil procedure. How to Account for Trauma and Emotions in Law Teachingis a vital reference point for legal educators who aim to create meaningful spaces for engagement within legal training. Ultimately, it proves a thought-provoking read for lawyers and law students, as well as trauma professionals and those working with the legal system.

For more than fifty years, scholars have documented and critiqued the marginalizing effects of the Socratic teaching techniques that dominate law school classrooms. In spite of this, law school budgets, staffing models, and course requirements still center Socratic classrooms as the curricular core of legal education. In this clear-eyed book, law professor Jamie R. Abrams catalogs both the harms of the Socratic method and the deteriorating well-being of modern law students and lawyers, concluding that there is nothing to lose and so much to gain by reimagining Socratic teaching. Recognizing that these traditional classrooms are still necessary sites to fortify and catalyze other innovations and values in legal education, Inclusive Socratic Teaching provides concrete tips and strategies to dismantle the autocratic power and inequality that so often characterize these classrooms. A galvanizing call to action, this hands-on guide equips educators and administrators with an inclusive teaching model that reframes the Socratic classroom around student-centered, skills-centered, client-centered, and community-centered teaching techniques.