Screencasting ethics and values: teaching contemporary legal issues and collective legal values through live screencasting

In the post-LETR environment, many questions still currently hang over the position of ethics and legal values in undergraduate legal education. The clear disjunction between the centrality of ethics in the profession and its absence from education was highlighted by the review as an area of proposed improvement. Furthermore, our students continually seek new mediums to engage with important legal subjects and issues, especially in the age of social media. With this in mind, Plymouth Law School has begun to fill this lacuna through using contemporary video resources to encourage consideration of legal values. This article evaluates live screencasting of current affairs to incite critical reflection upon collective legal values.     

Advancing justice interests and human rights of vulnerable groups through clinical legal education

Access to justice rights of vulnerable groups in the Maldives is significantly affected due to lack of information, awareness, accessibility, and legal representation. The provision of State-funded legal aid is only available in serious criminal cases, and free legal services provided by individual lawyers and civil society organisations are limited and scattered. Out of 20, only a handful of atolls in the Maldives have resident lawyers offering legal services. Thus, as a country with over 200 inhabited islands, key vulnerable groups such as women and children face serious challenges in attaining legal services and access to the system. This article emphasises the broader objectives of legal education and argues that by pursuing social justice goals and advancing the human rights of vulnerable groups in the Maldives, university law clinics can benefit legal education and the society at large.

     

NR Madhava Menon: The guiding light for global clinical legal education

The late NR Madhava Menon, known widely as ‘the father of modern legal education in India’, was also a leading voice for global legal education reform by championing ‘socially relevant legal education’ through clinical legal education throughout the world. This article concentrates on his seminal role in the founding of the Global Alliance for Justice Education (GAJE) and the crafting of its mission statement. Drawing on a number of key moments in Dr Menon’s lifelong dedication to the twin causes of legal education and social justice, it highlights how he brought an international perspective to his critical work on legal education reform in India by enlisting international collaborators, how he motivated international colleagues to bring similar reforms to their countries, and how he mentored new generations of legal educators in what has become a true global clinical movement. The article focuses specifically on how the guiding principles of GAJE’s inaugural conference, which Dr Menon co-chaired in 1999, reflect his vision of global clinical legal education that continues to guide GAJE and the global clinical movement today.

     

Using soft skills courses to inspire law teachers: a new methodology for a more humanistic legal education

ABSTRACT

Law schools have in recent years been engaged in a process of revising their curricula, in large part adapting to rapid changes in technology, but also in a more generalised effort to improve “teaching the law”. Yet thus far, legal pedagogy seems to focus disproportionately on the traditional model of the “thinking lawyer”, when it should equally promote the model of the “feeling lawyer”, helping students to sharpen soft skills such as empathy, integrity and problem-solving. The main claim of this paper is that law professors could begin to pay more attention to the growing importance of soft skills in legal education and preparedness for legal practice. In this direction, we propose a set of pedagogical principles revolving around four axes: compassionate, attentive, reason-based and empathetic teaching (CARE). This methodology could help law professors become more effective pedagogues. Soft skills courses constitute a well-suited vehicle for introducing these principles to law school curricula in different legal systems. By systematically incorporating them, law schools can encourage law teachers to provide a more inclusive learning environment for their students. At the same time, law teachers who implement the particular methodology can hopefully rediscover fulfilment in their teaching. Overall, teaching soft skills can significantly improve students’ and teachers’ experience in legal education.     

诊所法律教育在卫生法学教学中的应用研究

发源于美国的诊所法律教育借鉴了医学院学生在医疗诊所临床实习的做法,倡导在实践和经验中学习法律和律师的执业技能。法律诊所教育不仅在美国,在全球其他国家也产生了深远的影响。法律诊所教育发展到今天,它的价值不仅体现于课程本身,更体现为一种教学方法的变革。诊所法律在我国移植和推广的过程中,如何根据我国教学的实际情况,结合具体课程展开富有实效的应用研究,改革课程的教学方法,提高教学效果具有现实价值。     

The role of serendipity in legal education: a living curriculum perspective

This article evaluates the challenges of modular redesign and the potential contribution of serendipity in legal education by advancing a “living” curriculum model. The archaeology of the curricular redesign process is excavated by exploring the conditions influencing and constraining curricular redesign. Whilst this study is primarily located within the theoretical context of curricular redesign, it is also rooted in both the practice of law and higher education literature. A key concern of this research is to consider the under-explored interaction between serendipity and curricular design with a particular focus on how the surrounding serendipitous conditions proved timely and welcome in creating an unanticipated opportunity for such redesign. There remains a surprising dearth of research evaluating the influence of serendipity in legal education generally and, more specifically, with respect to the challenges of module redesign and delivery. This article uncovers a research agenda with themes concentrated on the role of serendipity in curricular design and how “real world” relevance can be incorporated into module redesign and delivery. It is suggested that serendipity-sensitive curricula which acknowledge current debates within law and the contemporary contexts within which law operates enhance students’ capacity to recognise the relevance and applicability of their legal knowledge. By remaining alert to the potential for serendipitous innovation in curricular redesign and by re-engineering curricula to facilitate serendipity, legal academics can enhance the incorporation of “real world” relevance into academic teaching.     

Human-centered legal tech: integrating design in legal education

As the legal profession begins in earnest to deploy digital technology in service and information delivery, greater numbers of law schools are including technology instruction in their curricula. The prospect of more lawyers with digital expertise, while a welcome development, amplifies a parallel imperative that new technology tools be designed to be responsive to evolving human needs. This paper argues that coupling technology instruction with training in human-centered design approaches offers legal educators a means of preparing lawyers not only able to generate novel technology solutions, but able to fundamentally improve legal institutions and programs through those results. The use of design pedagogies within legal education also provides educators and students with the opportunity to reimagine the law as a creative pursuit by exploring structured methods like empathy via observation, prototyping, and the embrace of failure, with learning outcomes that hold the potential to transform how lawyers approach their role. This paper concludes by detailing the insights the NuLawLab has gained in the application of design methodologies in the creation of digital legal resources, and the modifications we are adopting to the approach to produce better results for the legal sector.     

Social justice jurisprudence of clinical education programme: A paradigm shift from legal education to justice education

The legal profession has remained relevant in bringing about positive transformation in society — with leaders, policymakers, and change makers around the world mostly possessing a background in the law. That said, the trust, and positive image, enjoyed by legal professionals continues on a declining path. Considered more glamorous, the legal profession has gone astray from the path of social justice. In this article, I argue that the negative perception of legal professionals is, in large part, because of the way legal professionals are taught and trained in law schools. I argue that legal teaching pedagogy in South Asia, and generally in developing countries, is a product of colonial structure. Even after the so-called decolonisation movement, law schools and universities, for example in South Asia, institutionalised a legal pedagogy unsuited to the epistemic actualities of their societies. A law student in South Asia was and continues to be taught the Western conception of what the law is and its relationship to justice. In a legal culture carrying the transplanted laws of the colonisers, the students of developing countries are meticulously trained in the technical skills of reasoning and interpretation by applying Eurocentric guidelines of positivist construction. In light of this, I propose a shift in legal education: to transform the existing legal education and pedagogy into ‘justice education’. I focus on the ancient principles — located in the Eastern legal philosophy — of empirical reasoning and the importance of the human nature of sociability in arriving at social justice. To combat the tendency of insulating law students from societal problems, I propose a social justice-driven legal pedagogy. I have also reflected on some practices that ‘are’ and highlighted other practices that ‘ought to be’. My thesis connotes that the legal profession has an innate role in building the capability of individuals who are deprived and excluded. In line with it, I present examples of scalable clinical legal education being practised specially by the Kathmandu School of Law that can create multidimensional legal professionalism.

     

Dualism in Dutch legal education: The Nijmegen Law School

This study presents a pilot project and steps undertaken by Brunel Law School of Brunel University West London (UK) in response to the new challenges and pressures brought by globalisation in higher education. In the last few years there has been emerging consensus in the literature on the importance of internationalisation of higher education and student mobility as a tool for its achievement. Correspondingly, in the UK there has been a significant policy shift from the recruitment of international students to the development of collaborative agendas with overseas institutions and the student experience as the common platforms for the international activities of UK institutions. Thus, the aim of this study is to share with the legal education sector the experience of developing such a process of internationalisation through the design of a sustainable mobility programme for taught postgraduate students which has met the favourable response and financial support of the UK public funding system.