Barker, D --- "From the Editor" [2012] LegEdDig 33; (2012) 20(3) Legal Education Digest 3

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FROM THE EDITOR

As the year 2012 comes to an end members of ALTA may wish to reflect on the outcomes of the recent Association’s conference which took place in the University of Sydney Law Faculty at the beginning of July. As always there was a proliferation of papers covering a wide area of legal topics, some major plenary sessions involving the former Australian Prime Minister, Hon. Kevin Rudd, two Supreme Court of NSW Judges, the Hon. Justice Allsop, President of the NSW Court of Appeal and the Hon. Justice Michael Slattery together with what has now become an annual feature, a joint Roundtable organised in cooperation with the Australian Academy of Law. The latter featured a discussion of the topic: ‘The Linkage between Research and the Work of the Courts and the Legal Profession’ involving Hon Peter Rose, QC as Chair, with the principal speakers being the Hon. Acting Justice Ronald Sackville AO, QC, Dr Sarah Pritchard SC and Professor George Williams AO.

The Conference not only marked the end of Professor Gillian Triggs’ term as Dean of the Sydney Faculty of Law, it also brought to an end her roles as President of ALTA and Chair of CALD. The Conference also marked the end of Professor Rosalind Mason’s period of service as Chair of the General Executive of ALTA – four years – a year longer than any of her predecessors! She was honoured at the ALTA AGM by being appointed as a life member of the Association, as were Chief Justice Robert French AC of the High Court of Australia and the Hon Quentin Bryce, AC, the Governor-General of Australia. Professor Roman Tomasic, Dean of the University of South Australia Law School, has been elected to replace Ros as Chair of the ALTA General Executive. Although he is standing down as the Dean of the ANU College of Law at the end of this year after 15 years in the position, ALTA was pleased to welcome Professor Michael Coper as its new President. He will be succeeded in January 2013 by Professor Stephen Bottomley who will then become the new ANU Law Dean. Stephen will be presiding as President of ALTA during the time of the ALTA Conference now re-arranged to take place in Canberra at the end of September 2013. Certainly the 2012 ALTA Conference marked a period of change in the landscape of Australian legal education governance.

The Digest would also like to congratulate one of our related legal journals, the New Zealand Law Society Journal – ‘Law Talk’ – on the publication of its 800th Edition on 20 July 2012.

And so to the contents of this edition of the Digest:

The book reviewed in this issue is Getting a PhD in Law by Caroline Morris and Cian Murphy. Although it is described as: ‘A unique guide to obtaining a degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Law in the UK’, readers will discover that it will be of general appeal to anyone undertaking a Law PhD in any common law jurisdiction.

As to the articles digested in this edition, suffice to say that they again represent the wide field of activity and scholarship involved with legal education.

The two articles digested under the heading of Assessment Methods are concerned with disparate areas of assessment. Butler’s article deals with feedback on student performance and, as has become expected from the author, the innovative use of technology to provide an effective and efficient means of personalised feedback. Digest readers are encouraged to read how the author has achieved this by providing MP3 feedback by using a freely available and free-to-use Audacity program. In contrast Sargent, Springer and Curcio supply empirical evidence as to how formative assessments can increase learning and motivation by offering students feedback with respect to gaps between current and desired levels of performance. The study questions whether practice materials support those whose main goal is to get higher course grades rather than assisting those who wish to truly comprehend and master the content.

Foley, Rowe, Homes and Tang are concerned with effectiveness of teaching professionalism in a legal clinic – categorised as the first of three articles under Clinical Legal Education. They recount their experience of conducting a pilot project involving the exposure of their students to ‘live-client’ clinics and recommend the value of such programs in providing opportunities to explore various paradigms of ‘lawyering’, together with the fact that participants reported that such a practice allowed them to find a suitable balance between autonomy and supervision. In it Higgins, Dewhurst and Watkins make out a strong case for the value of field trips in stimulating the interest of law students. As the authors conclude, field trips can provide students with: ‘An opportunity to observe the law in action, contextualise their legal theory and develop important legal and personal skills.’ In the final article under this category the author Rosenbaum describes being faced by the joint challenge of acting as a technical advisor for just one week in Togo for the purpose of establishing the free delivery of legal services by the jurisdiction’s bar association and assisting in the delivery a clinical education component at the capital’s law school.

Curriculum is the basis for Galloway’s account of the James Cook University-wide refresh of its curricula with particular emphasis on the LLB curriculum by the School of Law. In this respect Galloway conducts a stimulating review of the literature relating to curriculum development and also describes how the JCU Law School explored the way other Australian law schools represented their degrees to the public in terms of the JCU refresh themes. Also it was essential that the JCU law academics took account of the tropical influence on the ongoing development of the JCU Law Degree.

Legal Education Generally incorporates two articles. In the first, Donna Cooper, Sheryl Jackson, Rosalind Mason and Mary Toohey look at the impact that the emergence of the JD has had on academic standards in legal education. They found that academic standards in JD programs offered by Australian law schools varied and that overall there was only a marginal preference amongst employers for graduates with a JD rather than a LLB, and foretold that law schools will have to revise their JD curricula and how they teach JD students as compared to LLB students. The other article under this heading is yet another which involves the effects of the Carnegie’s Foundation Report: Educating lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law. What Holmquist is seeking in the article is a call for dialogue on the basis that the Carnegie Report does not go as far as it could in identifying the problems in legal education.

Skills is the heading for two articles. In the first Lande emphasises the need for a practical approach to legal education with an emphasis on teaching students to negotiate like lawyers. Whilst the author deplores the distorted image often conveyed by law schools focusing disproportionately on litigation, nevertheless there is a concern that those advocating the importance of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) should not themselves indulge in ‘negotiation romanticism’! This is a well-argued article in respect of the importance in teaching negotiation, particularly with regard to the use of multi-stage simulations although there is a discussion as to the complementary advantages and disadvantages of both single-stage and multi-stage simulations. The other article under this heading by Schneider recognises the reality of the appropriate selection of skills for effective negotiators. The author reviews the various labels given to different approaches to negotiation. She emphasises the fact that when trying to teach skills it is important to focus less on the labels and more on the behaviours that they actually describe. In this respect account has to be taken of the weakness of labels and the necessity for ensuring that students do not become over-reliant on the simplification that labels provide.

Students incorporates two articles. In the first DeGroff focuses on how empirical research can tell us about the effect of law school pedagogy on law student learning styles. Its contents refer to the problem law teachers have in developing a more experiential teaching approach, particularly because of the constraints placed upon them by mostly being trained under variations of the Socratic approach to teaching. The article is helpful in examining the various ways in which ‘learning style’ has been defined and acknowledges the difficulty of fully capturing the concept. It concludes that the best description is that a learning style represents an individual’s: ‘Preferred way of thinking, processing and understanding information’. The other article under this heading is by Larcombe and Malkin and reviews the need to understand and support the first year experience of students commencing their study in law as postgraduates. The article incorporates a case study of the experience of Juris Doctor (JD) students undertaking their first year program at the University of Melbourne Law School.

Teachers is the heading for the final two articles in this edition. The first, by Baron and Corbin, relates to a form of professionalism which encompasses a sense of public obligation. Again this is another article which acknowledges the influence of the Carnegie Report, but it also emphasises the importance of participation in the community of practice as forming the basic building blocks of social learning systems and their importance in defining competence in a given context. This is a thought provoking article which emphasises the importance of fostering a sense of belonging to the legal community as a way of encouraging law students to look for meaning in their work which may, in the long run, contribute to a healthier and happier legal profession. The second article by Sonsteng examines the development of an appropriate method for evaluating teaching and learning tools in law school courses. This is an all-embracing review of various learning styles including the use of the Myer’s Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the creation of the Gerald F Hess effective learning environment, and the Edgar Dale ‘Cone of Experience’ learning theory. It also advocates the benefits of collaborative learning. The article conveys a stimulating message to finish this edition of the Digest regarding the challenges facing law academics in their roles as a peer and guide to their students.

Emeritus Professor David Barker AM

Editor