Barker, D --- "From the Editor" [2010] LegEdDig 16; (2010) 18(2) Legal Education Digest 3

• FROM THE EDITOR

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FROM THE EDITOR

In Australia the future of legal education has again been placed in the forefront with the release of the Federal Attorney General’s proposals for the development of a National Legal Profession. The recommendations will necessarily impinge on the current admission arrangements whereby admission of current law graduates into the legal profession is under the control of the relevant Chief Justices of the States and Territories. It remains to be seen whether the implementation of the current proposals results in a more universal form of admission procedure.

Professional legal education is also an aspect of the Digest’s remit so it was with interest that this editor read in the New Zealand Law Society’s publication for members – Law Talk – May 2010 Edition – that the New Zealand Law Society Board had agreed to develop and introduce a competency assurance scheme, which will include some form of mandatory continuing legal education. Of interest to legal educators is that the New Zealand Scheme has followed that introduced into other legal jurisdictions whereby it recognises both structured CLE activities and unstructured or self-study activities. The latter, which includes such activities as reading, viewing (e.g. webcasts, DVDs, videotapes), listening (CDs, audio tapes, podcasts) and participating in informal discussion or training, will be welcomed by those legal educators seeking a more flexible and inclusive approach to continuing professional legal education.

This flexible approach to legal education is also incorporated into the book reviewed within this edition. Teaching Law: A Framework for Instructional Mastery is atypical in that it has been especially published for law academics with the object of developing a more focused approach to law teaching.

It will also be of interest to our readers that of the fourteen articles digested in this edition five come under the heading of Skills. This would suggest the increasing emphasis on legal analysis, research and writing in the development of lawyering skills.

Interestingly, whilst the first article is digested under the heading of Clinical Legal Education, it too is also concerned that law students are not adequately prepared for legal practice – the skills dimension. In this first article by Sandefur and Selbin the authors explore the new findings from After the JD (AJD), which is the title of a national, longitudinal survey involving an empirical study of the career aspects of approximately 5,000 early-career lawyers. The outcomes of the project suggest that new lawyers ranked clinical courses more highly than such elements of law school training as legal writing or upper-year lecture courses. The research also expresses the view of new lawyers that they also rated clinical training as one of the most helpful elements of the law school curriculum for assisting them in the transition to early work assignments as attorneys.

Educational Theory is the designation for Del Mar’s article which explores the possibility of studying some aspects of competition law on the basis of ‘thinking with the senses in legal playgrounds’. The author’s esoteric approach embraces an examination as to what legal education might be able to gain by taking seriously the richness of images and the ability to see. He argues that learning is part of knowledge and that such knowledge consists in the experience of insight acquired in the process of playing. This theory is further developed by examining how legal playgrounds as learning spaces might be used to teach the practice of precedent. A most thought provoking article.

Under Individual Subjects/Areas of Law Perlin deplores what the article describes as the ‘ghettoisation’ of mental disability law within legal education, the topic being basically rejected as a subject in most traditional law school curricula. He argues that there is a sanism towards mental health law by the legal academy which reflects the prejudices of the rest of society. He strongly advocates the significance of therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) in assisting in the assessment of the ultimate impact of case law and legislation in the way that affects mentally disabled individuals.

Interdisciplinary Aspects forms the basis for Burke, Johnson and Kemp to examine the role of business education in a flat world economy and to assess how legal courses equip business students with portable modern skills and relevant academic knowledge. The authors advocate the acceptance of the Boyer Model of Scholarship in achieving this objective whereby Boyer supported the abandonment of the traditional teaching vs. research model in favour of a much broader definition of scholarship.

Legal Education Generally is the heading for Owen’s article which investigates a number of reports which have been recently published on learning in the tertiary sector in the United Kingdom and which impinge on legal education generally. Many of the reports are concerned with funding and the development of clearer progression routes from vocational courses into higher education.

No edition of the Digest passes without at least one article on Legal Ethics and in this edition it incorporates an article by Rhode who examines the reason why it is only recently that ethics has been taken seriously by the legal community. In the view of the author it was the Watergate scandal which brought the American Bar Association to mandate accredited law schools to introduce courses focusing on ethical issues. These have also now become a required topic in an increasing number of American state bar examinations. The author stresses the importance of how future professional responsibility courses should encourage potential lawyers to match their personal values with their career priorities.

As already stated there are five articles which come under the category of Skills. The first by Christensen explores the relationship between law students’ achievement goals and their success in law school. It incorporates a research project relating to goal achievement theory and examines the correlation between students’ personal achievement goals in law school and their academic success (class rank). The research also explores the relationship between lawyering skills grade and mastery goal orientation. The outcomes of the study would suggest that the power of skills courses enhance the success of law students. In contrast Enquist’s article involves a small case study involving the working methods and composing processes of six law students. An outcome of the study was that successful students were putting in more than twice the hours of the least successful students and even 25 per cent more time than some of the moderately successful students. Johns’ article examines various aspects of critical thinking skills. Much of this is concerned with the Logic Doctor, a teaching method which is a discipline-specific and skill-specific method developed and used by the author. Miller and Charles question the traditional view that teaching critical thinking is straightforward and put forward the alternative opinion that cognitive psychology has taught that the best students are those who master the subsidiary skills of analysis. In arguing how legal analysis can be taught they illustrate their article by employing the familiar IRAC framework which incorporates Issue, Rule, Analysis and Conclusion. This concept involves the student in identifying the issue, the applicable rule, matching the facts to the law in an analysis or application and then finally reaching a conclusion. In the final article Salisbury explores the reasons why current legal writing programs are not currently equipping former law graduates to cope with the demands of the legal profession. To remedy this situation the author advocates the adoption of the legal research and writing model pioneered by JURIST. This is an online legal news and commentary service founded by Professor Bernard J. Hibbitts and hosted by the University Of Pittsburgh School Of Law.

Under Students, Tani and Vines question why so many law students and law professionals are disproportionately affected by depression. Their concern echoes those of others in the legal profession as to why many law students who commence their studies with a feeling of wellbeing become subjected to depression within six to twelve months of entering law school. One interesting aspect of their research is the significant differences in law students’ attitudes to their education as compared with students in other disciplines.

Teaching Methods & Media incorporates two articles. The first is a case study by McCall of the blended learning aspects of the University of Wollongong Professional Legal Training course. This involved the implementation of the technology offered by the University’s generic Learning Management System (LMS) which was supported by a framework for the course, an outcome of an Australian Universities Teaching Committee’s (AUTC) funded project. The other article under this heading is by Stephenson, Morse, Robertson, Castan, Yarrow and Thompson and concerns the advantages offered by the use of a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system in transmitting simultaneously an internationally comparative Indigenous rights course to students in six participating universities in a number of countries including North America, New Zealand and Australia. This videoconferencing technology is based at the host university (generally, the University of Ottawa) and embraces live classes which take place simultaneously.

In reviewing the output of all of these articles one is led to the conclusion that an enormous amount of thought and research is being devoted by law academics to their teaching programs. Surely this can only result in better outcomes for the future quality of the legal profession.

Emeritus Professor David Barker AM

Editor