Admission to higher education: The legal issues arising from applicants with criminal convictions

Historically, applicants for entry to higher education have not been required to declare information about their background with respect to criminal convictions. In the 1990s a number of cases arose where entrants to higher education who did have criminal backgrounds proceeded to reoffend. In response, the University and Colleges Admissions Service introduced from 1998 a question on its standard application form which requires all applicants to declare whether or not they have any criminal convictions. This apparently innocuous question raises a significant number of legal issues, most notably relating to contractual and tortious duties, rehabilitation of offenders, human rights and data protection. This article considers each of these areas with reference, as appropriate, to the interests of both the applicant with criminal convictions and other members of the higher education community who might be at risk should reoffending occur.     

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.     

A legal perspective on university technology transfer

In the thirty-five years after passage of the Bayh–Dole Act of 1980, a robust literature has documented the emergence of university technology transfer as a critical mechanism for the dissemination and commercialization of new technology stemming from federally-funded research. Missing from these investigations, however, is what this paper terms the legal perspective, an understanding of how the law and its attendant mechanisms impact university technology transfer. Specifically, the paper reviews the extant legal scholarship and provides examples of how case law, legal structures, and the unique nature of intellectual property law affects technology transfer, as well as higher education policy and management. Throughout, we propose critical questions for future investigation, which serve to form a cross-disciplinary research agenda that can contribute fresh insights to scholarly and policy discussions related to the role of universities in economic and social development.     

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.

     

American legal education: yesterday and today

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