Key Directions In Legal Education

Key Directions in Legal Education identifies and explores key contemporary and emerging themes that are significant and heavily debated within legal education from both UK and international perspectives. It provides a rich comparative dialogue and insights into the current and future directions of legal education. 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. The approach of pairing UK and international authors to obtain comparative insights and analysis on a range of key themes is original and provides both a genuine comparative dialogue and a clear international focus. This book will be of great interest for researchers, academics and post-graduate students in the field of law and legal pedagogy.

"This edited book addresses contemporary challenges in Clinical Legal Education (CLE), considering its role in legal education and in the broader community that it serves. Written by experts from various international contexts, the book explores how the changing nature and requirements of legal practice alongside social and technological developments affect the pedagogy of Clinical Legal Education. Chapters chart the development of Clinical Legal Education across various jurisdictions and examine developments in program design and supervision of and in CLE along with the role of CLE in the community. The authors also reflect on the dynamic and developing role of Clinical Legal Education and offer recommendations for the future. This book will be essential reading for academics, researchers in clinical legal education and those interested in legal education across the world. It will also be of interest to students of clinical legal education whose research requires a deeper understanding of the current themes and issues of the subject"--

Thinking About Clinical Legal Education provides a range of philosophical and theoretical frameworks that can serve to enrich the teaching and practice of Clinical Legal Education (CLE). CLE has become an increasingly common feature of the curriculum in law schools across the globe. However, there has been relatively little attention paid to the theoretical and philosophical dimensions of this approach. This edited collection seeks to address this gap by bringing together contributions from the clinical community, to analyse their CLE practice using the framework of a clearly articulated philosophical or theoretical approach. Contributions include insights from a range of jurisdictions including: Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Ethiopia, Israel, Spain, UK and the US. This book will be of interest to CLE academics and clinic supervisors, practitioners, and students.

How we interpret and understand the historical contexts of legal education has profoundly affected how we understand contemporary educational cultures and practices. This book, the result of a Modern Law Review seminar, both celebrates and critiques the lasting impact of Peter Birks’ influential edited collection, Pressing Problems in the Law: Volume 2: What is the Law School for? Published in 1996, his book addresses many critical issues that are hauntingly present in the 21st century, amongst them the impact of globalisation; technological disruption; and the tension inherent in law schools as they seek to balance the competing interest of teaching, research and administration. Yet Birks’ collection misses key issues, too. The role of wellbeing, of emotion or affect, the relation of legal education to education, the status of legal education in what, since his volume, have become the devolved jurisdictions of Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland – these and others are absent from the research agenda of the book. Today, legal educators face new challenges. We are still recovering from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on our universities. In 1996 Birks was keen to stress the importance of comparative research within Europe. Today, legal researchers are dismayed at the possibility of losing valuable EU research funding when the UK leaves the EU, and at the many other negative effects of Brexit on legal education. The proposed Solicitors Qualifying Examination takes legal education regulation and professional learning into uncharted waters. This book discusses these and related impacts on our legal educations. As law schools approach an existential crossroads post-Covid-19, it seems timely to revisit Birks’ fundamental question: what are law schools for?

Taking up the study of legal education in distinctly biopolitical terms, this book provides a critical and political analysis of resistance in the law school. Legal education concerns the complex pathways by which an individual becomes a lawyer, making the journey from lay-person to expert, from student to practitioner. To pose the idea of a biopolitics of legal education is not only to recognise the tensions surrounding this journey but also to recognise that legal education is a key site in which the subject engages, and is engaged by, a particular structure—and here the particular structure of the law school. This book explores the resistance to that structure, including: different ways in which law’s pedagogic structures might be incomplete, or are being fought against; the use of less conventional elements of cultural discourse to resist the abstraction of the lawyer in students’ subject formation; the centralisation of queer and feminist discourses to disrupt the hierarchies of the legal curriculum; the use of digital technologies; the place of embodiment in legal education settings; and the impacts of posthuman knowledges and contexts on legal learning. Assembling original, field-defining essays by both leading international scholars and emerging researchers, this book constitutes an indispensable resource in legal education research and scholarship that will appeal to legal academics everywhere.