Nelson, J --- "In This Issue" [2005] LegEdDig 50; (2005) 14(2) Legal Education Digest 2

In This Issue

Dr John Nelson

[2005] LegEdDig 50; (2005) 14(2) Legal Education Digest 2

For this particular issue we were unable to find a recent book or report on legal education matters to critique in a review article. Nonetheless, we have a total of 13 articles digested, the bulk of which come from recent issues of the Journal of Legal Education and the Legal Education Review. They range over the usual wide spectrum of topics which exercise the minds of the members of the legal academy.

Under Individual Subjects/Areas of Law, there are two articles. Rand & Light describe their experiences in presenting a teaching module on affirmative action in which students role-play as a university admissions committee. They conclude that teaching about race is undermined in classrooms from which there is an absence of a critical mass of students of colour. Lung offers suggestions for broadening law school coverage of low-wage workers’ issues. She contends that students are better positioned to represent low-wage workers and provide legal assistance to workers’ organising campaigns when they understand how the intersection of class, gender, race, immigration and citizenship shapes oppression in the workplace.

Under Teaching Methods & Media, Henriss-Anderssen reflects upon her use of interactive teaching strategies in the large lecture theatre environment and the effectiveness of these strategies in improving student learning. Hardy describes the Market Day Project, a series of activities aimed at giving students a number of different perspectives on legal disputes involving consumers and engaging them in the complexities of real-life situations.

The role of law schools in fostering in students the cultural change necessary to support increased pro bono services, by means of conveying to them the significance of public service as a professional responsibility, is the subject of an article by Booth under Clinical Legal Education. Also under this heading, Massey & Rosenblum propose a law school clinical model for serving youth and special education needs, thereby demonstrating that special education representation increases disability awareness among law students.

Under Admission to Practice, Darrow-Kleinhaus sets out to refute the criticisms contained in the Society of American Law Teachers’ statement on the bar examination, which he contends serves a necessary function by testing competency in the most basic and essential analytical skills required for the practice of law. The article by Kirgis, under Enrolment Policies, reveals how, under the US News and World Report law school rankings, part-time programs are not counted, which results in law schools being offered a free pass to increase their enrolments of minorities without significant impact on their rankings.

There is an extremely thought-provoking article by James, under Context, Criticism & Theory, about the role for critique in Australian legal education. He outlines six relatively discrete ideologies or discourses which dominate legal education and calls for a consideration of a wider, deeper, more complex, more self-reflective and more socially aware approach to the possibilities for the use of critique in law school. Under Teachers appears an article in which Seigel seeks to define the concept of collegiality among legal academics and then explores the benefits of collegiality and the range of responses to instances of uncollegiality displayed by individual faculty members.

Burnett, under Legal Ethics, presents a sampling of instances of what he calls professionalism’s second wave, pointing out that the narrowness or breadth of public service programs at a law school can serve as an indicator of how seriously the school takes its responsibility to prepare students for the professional obligations they will be expected to fulfill. In the section on Skills, there is an article by Hutchinson reviewing the impact of the 2002 Australasian research skills training survey. He concludes that there has been a transformation in the curriculum response to legal research in the past 15 years but that the impetus for change has shown recent signs of slowing. Finally, under Students, Freeland, Li and Young confront the challenges of educating Asian law students in business law as a tool in a globalising world to facilitate the workings of international commerce and political relations.