Legal Education: Teaching and Learning Law

A collection of resources that support personal learning towards decolonizing teaching.

General starting points focused on teaching and learning from the Centre for Teaching and Learning at Queen's.

Inspired by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action, this website lists specific recommendations for reconciliation curriculum reform for each course taught in law school.

This book provides an examination of the meanings of decolonisation and explores how this examination can inform teaching, researching, and practising of law. It explores the ways in which the foundations of law are entangled in colonial thought and in its [re]production of ideas of commodification of bodies and space-time.

This article investigates educational strategies that law schools could implement to honour Recommendation #28 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and foster strong intercultural interpretation and communication skills amongst new generations of legal professionals in relation to Indigenous legal viewpoints.

This article explores how law professors and others might best teach Indigenous peoples’ law. While this article suggests that Indigenous peoples’ law can be discussed in numerous ways, including within conventional law school frameworks, it emphasizes that such law is best taught in other ways. Indigenous legal traditions should be organized in accordance with Indigenous frameworks. Using Anishinaabe law examples, this article stresses how the teaching of Indigenous peoples’ law should be done in culturally appropriate ways that open rather than confine fields of inquiry within Indigenous law and practice.

This article examines pedagogical developments in Canadian law schools related to outdoor education. In the process, it shows how recommendations from the Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission can be applied, which called for law schools to create Indigenous-focused courses related to skills-based training in intercultural competency, conflict resolution, human rights and anti-racism.

How can legal clinics and clinical legal educators respond to the ongoing harms of settler colonialism? At a time when "reconciliation" is top of mind for many legal educators in light of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission calls to action, can reconciliation be taken up in a meaningful way through clinical legal education? Does reconciliation demand decolonization and if so can clinical legal education work towards decolonization?

In this article, we introduce one method, which we believe has great potential for working respectfully and productively with Indigenous laws today. We engage with Indigenous legal traditions by carefully and consciously applying adapted common law tools, such as legal analysis and synthesis, to existing and often publicly available Indigenous resources: stories, narratives, and oral histories. By bringing common pedagogical approaches from many Indigenous legal traditions together with standard common law legal education, we hope to help people learn Indigenous laws from an internal point of view.