Legal Education: Teaching and Learning Law

This book calls for a critical re-evaluation of university legal education, with the particular aim of strengthening its academic nature. It emphasizes lecturers’ responsibility to challenge the assumptions students have about law, and the importance of putting law in a theoretical and social context that allows for critical reflection and sceptical detachment.

The challenge of professional preparation for the law is to link the interests of educators with the needs of lawyers and the members of the public the profession is pledged to serve. Educating Lawyers examines how well law schools meet the challenge of linking these interests. The book is based on extensive field research at a wide variety of law schools in the United States and Canada that involved observations and interviews with faculty, students, and administrators. The book presents a detailed picture of how law school goes about its great work of transforming students into professionals and probes the gaps and the unintended consequences of key aspects of the law school experience.

The book discusses in detail topics including the pressures on law schools exerted by external stakeholders, the fostering of interdisciplinary approaches and collaboration within legal education and the evolution of discourses around teaching and learning legal skills. It elaborates on the continuing development of clinical legal education as a component of the law degree and the emergence and use of innovative technologies within law teaching.

Over the last decade, cost pressures, technology, automation, globalisation, de-regulation, and changing client relationships have transformed the practice of law, but legal education has been slow to respond. Deciding what learning objectives a law degree ought to prioritise, and how to best strike the balance between vocational and academic training, are questions of growing importance for students, regulators, educators, and the legal profession. This collection provides a range of perspectives on the suite of skills required by the future lawyer and the various approaches to supporting their acquisition. Contributions report on a variety of curriculum initiatives, including role-play, gamification, virtual reality, project-based learning, design thinking, data analytics, clinical legal education, apprenticeships, experiential learning and regulatory reform, and in doing so, offer a vision of what modern legal education might look like.

Teaching Law reimagines law-school teaching and scholarship by going beyond crises now besetting the legal academy and examining deeper and longer-lasting challenges. The book argues that the legal academy has long neglected the needs to focus teaching and scholarship on the ideals of justice that law fitfully serves, the political origins of law, and the development of a respectful but critical relationship with the legal profession.