The Futures Of Legal Education And The Legal Profession

We are currently witnessing an unprecedented transformation in the legal profession and legal education. The Legal Services Act 2007 and the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 have both enabled and necessitated dramatic structural changes to the profession, as well as impacting on its ethos and ethicality. The recent Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) promises similarly dramatic change to the provision of legal education, reflecting the shifting landscape of both the legal professional market and Higher Education in general. These transformative changes bring both exciting opportunities and challenges with which everyone involved in the law – from University lecturers, to Senior Partners in leading law firms, to the judiciary – must grapple. This edited collection comprises a selection of papers presented at the 2nd conference of CEPLER, Birmingham Law School's Centre for Professional Legal Education and Research. The aim of the Conference, and thus this collection, was to bring together leading academic scholars, senior figures from professional practice, policy-makers, and representatives of the regulatory authorities, to reflect on the key issues arising from this transformative moment. As such, this volume of essays covers diverse ground, from curriculum development to professional theory, enriched and enhanced by the range of backgrounds and perspectives of its contributors.

"We are currently witnessing an unprecedented transformation in the legal profession and legal education. The Legal Services Act 2007 and the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 have enabled and necessitated dramatic structural changes to the profession, as well as impacting on its ethos and ethicality. The Legal Education and Training Review promises similarly dramatic change to the provision of legal education, reflecting the shifting landscape of both the legal professional market and higher education in general. These transformative changes bring both exciting opportunities and challenges. This edited collection comprises a selection of papers presented at the second conference of CEPLER, Birmingham Law School's Centre for Professional Legal Education and Research. It brings together leading academic scholars, senior figures from professional practice, policymakers and representatives of the regulatory authorities, to reflect on the key issues arising from this transformative moment."--Résumé de l'éditeur.

The Future of Australian Legal Education Conference was held in August 2017 to mark the 10th anniversary of the Australian Academy of Law (AAL), the 90th anniversary of the Australian Law Journal (ALJ) and the 30th anniversary of the Pearce Report on Australian Law Schools. The conference provided a forum for an informed, national discussion on the future of legal study and practice in Australia, covering practitioners, academics, judges and students.

This book discusses the opportunities and challenges facing legal education in the era of globalization. It identifies the knowledge and skills that law students will require in order to prepare for the practice of tomorrow, and explores pedagogical shifts legal education needs to make inside and outside of the classroom. With contributions from leading experts on legal education from various jurisdictions across the globe, the work combines theoretical depth with practical insights. Seeking to understand the changing landscape of legal education in the era of globalization, the contributions find that law schools can, and must, adopt educational strategies that at least present students with different understandings of what studying and practicing law is meant to be about. They find that law schools need to offer their students choices, a vision of practice that is not driven entirely by the demands of the marketplace or the needs of major international law firms. Bridging the gap between theory and practice, this book makes a significant contribution to the impact of globalization on legal education, and how students and law schools need to adapt for the future. It will be of great interest to academics and students of comparative legal studies and legal education, as well as policy-makers and practitioners.

For several years legal professions across the world have, to varying degrees, been undergoing dramatic changes as a result of a range of forces such as globalization, diversification and changes in regulation. In many jurisdictions the extent of these transformations have led to a process of professional fragmentation and generated uncertainty at institutional, organisational and individual levels about the nature and future of legal professionalism. As a result legal education is in flux in many of jurisdictions including the United States, the UK and Australia, with further effects in other Common Law and some Civil law countries. The situation in the UK exemplifies the sense of uncertainty and crisis, with a growing number of pathways into law; an increasing surplus of law graduates to graduate entry positions and most recently proposals for reform of legal education and training by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA). This collection addresses both current and historical approaches showing that some problems which appear to be modern are endemic, that there are still some important prospects for change and that policy issues may be more important than the interests of lawyers and educators. This makes this volume a source of interest to lawyers, law students, academic and policy makers as well as the discerning public. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the Legal Profession.

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.

The topic of "too many lawyers" is timely. The future make up and performance of the legal profession is in contest. What do we mean by "too many"? Is there a surplus of lawyers and what sort of lawyers are and will be needed? How best can we discern this? This book, is composed of scholarly articles presented at the Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law (Spain), by some of the best researchers in the field, aims to answer these questions. This collection, with an introduction by Prof. Richard L. Abel, addresses methodological, normative and policy questions regarding the number of lawyers in particular countries and worldwide, while connecting this phenomenon to political, social, economic, historical, cultural and comparative contexts. This makes this book a source of interest to lawyers, law students, academic and policy makers as well as the discerning public. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the Legal Profession.

In the last few decades university teaching has been recognised as an activity which can be studied and improved through educational scholarship. In some disciplines this is now well established. It remains emergent in legal education. The field is rich with questions to be answered, issues to be raised. This book provides the first overall review of legal education scholarship. The chapters outline the history of legal education research and provide a detailed analysis of the trends in areas of publication. Beyond this, the book suggests a typology for further conceptualising the field and a series of suggested paths for future research. The book originated from the 2017 UNSW conference "Research in Legal Education: State of the Art?" It features internationally respected authors who bring their perspectives on how legal education – as a field of research – should be conceptualised. The collection is arranged into three themes. First, a historical view is taken of the emergence of legal education scholarship and its roots that predate modern educational theory. Secondly, the book provides overviews of the extant field of publications, highlighting areas of interest and neglect, and delineating the trends in current publication. Thirdly, the book provides a set of suggested typologies for describing legal education research and a series of essays for future directions which both critique current approaches and provide inspiration for future directions. The State of Legal Education Research represents an authoritative introduction to the field, a set of conceptual tools with which to describe it, and inspiration for researchers to expand and grow research into legal education.