Law School Curriculum Research Articles

Introducing the Internet to the Law School: Some Lessons from Adelaide

The world of education is shifting outside of the four walls of the traditional classroom and into the virtual world of the internet. Some view this shift with trepidation whilst others embrace it with an almost religious zeal. Neither of these extreme reactions is necessary. Web-based learning is neither the natural enemy of the traditional teacher nor the panacea to all that ails the traditional approach. It is simply an extra tool which, when used in combination with traditional methods, can result in a powerful teaching and learning experience. This paper explores the benefits and pitfalls of introducing the internet into the Law School curriculum. The experiences of the Adelaide University in the introduction and implementation of the internet provide a context for this exploration via a consideration of some of the lessons learnt.

Teaching Legal Research

ABSTRACT Questions about the importance and viability of legal research and writing as a part of the law school curriculum are not novel. Confronting these questions head-on, however, is a responsibility that should be handled by law librarians. This article addresses the issue of teaching legal research in an academic law library setting. The reasons why the author has pursued an aggressive approach when dealing with legal research instruction are explored. The methods employed to carry out that legal research instruction mandate are examined. creased as legal research and writing are more and more frequently combined and taught by writing faculty.1 At the same time, the research skills of law students are on a downward spiral. Howland and Lewis document this plunge in an informative survey.2 Law librarian Donald Dunn substantiates this decline and attributes it, in part, to “the increased emphasis in law schools on legal writing,”3 in consequence of which, while “legal writing entered the expressway; legal research took the off-ramp.”4 Further, law librarians and legal research have even been pummeled by one of America's most popular authors.5 In this environment, it may seem unwise to continue to advance the argument that academic law librarians should teach legal research. Notwithstanding the obstacles that face such instruction, law librarians have an obligation to press forward in this important work.6 Legal writing instructors have not demonstrated that they have the expertise to provide this instruc-tion.7 Likewise, law faculty have demonstrated that they do not have the interest in tackling the task.8 Say two authorities on the subject: “Regular faculty members generally do not teach a research course, and when they do decide to teach one, the results are invariably disastrous. Most law faculty members cannot teach legal research because they do not understand it themselves. If compelled to teach the course, they rebel.”9 Perhaps it is time for law schools to cede the stewardship for legal research instruction to those information professionals who have been trained and are qualified to teach legal research instruction -law librarians.10 And it is time for any reticent law librarians to accept the obligation to take a more proactive approach toward teaching legal research.11

Borders and Boundaries: Locating the Law in Film

The essay examines the emergence of law and film in the curricula of law schools in the context of Britain. It outlines the development of legal education in England and Wales and the relationship between legal education and training. It notes the broadening out of the syllabus to encompass more politicized courses taught within their socio‐economic context like family law and labour law. From this shift of academic focus the politically contextual has extended to the cultural context. The relationship between law and culture both in literature and in other areas has been the end result of this relaxation of focus on professional education. Finally, the precise nature of law and film and its boundaries are discussed.

Constructing the Field of Professional Responsibility

The role of lawyer is widely understood by law students and practitioners as the entry into a simplified ethical world, one in which ordinary moral principles are cleared away by the hegemony of doctrines unique to the practice of law. This understanding is supported by and may originate in a particular view of lawyers' professional responsibility, a view in which a lawyer's ethical obligations as a professional are defined largely (though not entirely) by specialized legal rules - principally the codes of ethics and other rules that regulate lawyer conduct - and the policies thought to underlie those rules. There is nothing natural or even intuitive about defining lawyers' ethical obligations primarily in terms of compliance with rules. Indeed, there has long been a debate about whether black letter codifications can possibly serve as an adequate platform for ethical deliberation. But to acknowledge this debate is not to argue that there is some alternative way of thinking about lawyers' professional responsibility that is truly or actually natural. All fields of law must be constructed somehow. What is worth consideration is how a field is constructed in one way rather than another, and the effects of any given construction. Our thesis embraces two claims. The first claim is that within the traditional law school curriculum, law is constructed as a relatively autonomous discipline distinguished from other disciplines, including philosophical ethics, and that the discipline of law is subdivided into relatively separate fields. Thus, notwithstanding more than a century of developments in legal education and claims of progress in our understanding of law - notwithstanding the academy's apparent absorption of influences ranging from legal realism to critical legal studies to feminist jurisprudence to critical race theory to a host of law and analyses - students continue to be educated into a relatively Langdellian world view. The second claim is that within the traditional law school curriculum, Professional Responsibility is constructed as its own field of law. As a consequence, law students learn to think of law generally, and Professional Responsibility specifically, as disengaged from moral considerations. Part One of the article takes up the questions how and why the Professional Responsibility field has been traditionally structured in the law school curriculum on a legalistic model, i.e., as but another field of law separated from ordinary moral concerns. In Part Two, we point out that there is nothing about the concept of law that requires its separation from ordinary moral reasoning. We suggest that when law is constructed so as to be saturated with moral considerations, then the professional work of lawyers, and hence their professional responsibilities, can be understood to be similarly saturated. In Part Three, we explore some of what is at stake in our decisions about how to construct Professional Responsibility. We consider both the powerful allure that the traditional construction has for law students and practitioners and the construction's remarkable resiliency in the face of repeated, multidimensional assaults on the legalistic model.

Bricks Plus Bytes: How 'Click-and-Brick' Will Define Legal Education Space

Examining a number of technological, commercial and professional scenarios the author argues that the law school of the near future must become a hybrid place, what is known in ecommerce as a or click-and-mortar. In a click-and-brick law school distributive-learning techniques will fill much of the space, supplementing traditional class experiences and substituting for many of them. But a true click-and-brick will also integrate distance learning (or distance education) methodologies, reaching out to remote students, enabling collaboration with off-campus faculty and consuming remote content. The article examines the qualitative and institutional arguments frequently raised against such non-traditional legal education and argues that the traditional law school model will be substantially altered not only because of the implications of the new enabling technologies but because law school space is no longer a self-contained autonomous, insulated environment. The article examines how a sustainable click-and-brick model for legal education will involve significant re-engineering of virtual and physical law school space, a re-engineering that must be cognizant of the ways in which law practice is being reshaped and how the law school curriculum will require major re-tooling to be relevant to the Information Age.

Statement and recommendations on teaching problem solving in the law school curriculum

Statement and recommendations on teaching problem solving in the law school curriculum

Beyond core skills and values: Integrating therapeutic jurisprudence and preventive law into the law school curriculum.

Beyond core skills and values: Integrating therapeutic jurisprudence and preventive law into the law school curriculum.

Emotional intelligence and legal education.

The traditional knowledge-based law school curriculum is slowly giving way to one that increasingly exposes students to various lawyering skills. Nonetheless, legal educators are generally averse — or at best ill equipped — to support that training with the empathic and psychological skills good lawyering demands. The author discusses how emotional intelligence is essential to good lawyering and argues that it can and should be cultivated in law school. The article draws upon three examples of popular culture to explore both the absence and possibilities of interpersonal intelligence in the practice of law. The author also describes her own law school's current project of re-imagining legal education and explains how the development of emotional skills might be incorporated into that vision.

Beyond core skills and values: Integrating therapeutic jurisprudence and preventive law into the law school curriculum.

Beyond core skills and values: Integrating therapeutic jurisprudence and preventive law into the law school curriculum.

Women in the Law School Curriculum: Equity is About More Than Just Access

[Extract] As students have become increasingly familiar with, and dependent on, computer technology, the boundaries of what constitutes a comfortable, stimulating, flexible and varied learning environment have altered. This inevitably adds to the demands placed on those individuals who have painstakingly developed, programmed, tested, and refined unique computer packages for student learning. Keeping materials updated is of particular importance in legal education, and this maintenance function alone can consume substantial resources. The task of adapting an existing program to incorporate textual changes and new technologies on an ongoing basis, while concurrently developing new programs, is a particularly overwhelming one. Indeed, the task may be beyond individuals or even institutions. For the program author who wishes to capitalise on work already completed and to enhance the benefits gained thereby, a different approach to future development is clearly required.

Legal Education and People

In 1987 the Pearce Committee, established by the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission (CTEC) to examine legal education in Australia’s then twelve law schools, made the following suggestion (“Suggestion 1”): That all law schools examine the adequacy of their attention to theoretical and critical perspectives, including the study of law in operation and the study of the relations between law and other social forces. This article considers to what extent feminist theoretical and critical perspectives have been incorporated into law school curricula, given the substantial period which has passed since the Committee’s suggestion was made. This is partly in response to the consistent expressions of disquiet from feminists who argue that, stemming from an androcentric perspective of life and law, legal education delivers inaccurate messages about women and is gender-biased. I have limited this study to a consideration of the curriculum of the first year introductory subject taught in Australian law schools. An examination of this subject is important as it is the commencement of an individual’s socialisation as a law student and a future practitioner of the law. In this article, I have identified and considered, from a feminist perspective, the treatment of the legal rules and doctrines normally taught in introductory courses and also considered what may be absent from the course contents. From my analysis, it is apparent that there has been a strong movement toward the incorporation of feminist (and other) theoretical and critical perspectives in the introductory courses. However, there is still a significant number of courses that approach the subject-matter uncritically with very little or no feminist content. I argue, in this article, that a law course that uncritically presents legal doctrines risks adopting and perpetuating the unstated point-of-view of a particular cultural group in our society. I discuss the constitution of this cultural group and conclude, as have others, that it is largely comprised of affluent, educated Anglo-Celtic males. I argue that legal education should be openly self-conscious of the culturally-specific point-of-view of the law, and should recognise and address its own partiality.

Emotional intelligence and legal education.

The traditional knowledge-based law school curriculum is slowly giving way to one that increasingly exposes students to various lawyering skills. Nonetheless, legal educators are generally averse — or at best ill equipped — to support that training with the empathic and psychological skills good lawyering demands. The author discusses how emotional intelligence is essential to good lawyering and argues that it can and should be cultivated in law school. The article draws upon three examples of popular culture to explore both the absence and possibilities of interpersonal intelligence in the practice of law. The author also describes her own law school's current project of re-imagining legal education and explains how the development of emotional skills might be incorporated into that vision.

Negotiation skills training in the law school curriculum

Negotiation skills training in the law school curriculum

Grand Narratives and The Law School Curriculum: Teaching Indigenous Australians and The Law

Jennifer Clarke and Anne Orford were invited by the Editorial Board of the Australian Feminist Law Journal to contribute to the Special Issue of the Journal a discussion of the constraints which the traditions of law teaching might place upon what it was possible to include in a course on justice, indigenous peoples and relationships to land in Australia. Both were known to Board members as innovative teachers and as scholars interested in the politics of curriculum change in law teaching. The following Interview was conducted by Jennifer and Anne during March 1998.

The Secret Life of the Trust: The Trust as an Instrument of Commerce

In the culture of Anglo-American law, we think of the trust as a branch of the law of gratuitous transfers. That is where we teach trusts in the law school curriculum,1 that is where we locate trusts in the statute books,2 and that is where American lawyers typically encounter the trust in their practice. The trust originated at the end of the Middle Ages as a means of transferring wealth within the family,3 and the trust remains our characteristic device for organizing intergenerational wealth transmission when the transferor has substantial assets or complex family affairs. In the succinct formulation of Bernard Rudden, Anglo-American lawyers regard the trust as essentially a gift, projected on the plane of time and so subjected to a management regime.4

Introducing a Client-Centred Focus into the Law School Curriculum

This paper examines recent research showing widespread dissatisfaction with the legal profession, especially as a result of failures in lawyer/client communications. We ask whether part, at least, of the blame lies with law schools, who largely neglect the client in the law degree curriculum. The question then posed is, what is the role of our law schools and to what extent should clients be a part of their perspective, particularly at a time when the nature of legal practice is undergoing profound change. One indication of this is the emphasis or lack of emphasis given to teaching skills in the law degree curriculum, especially those skills which give context to the law and affect the consumer of legal services, the client. We consider the relationship between the law degree and practical legal training courses, what skills are currently taught by law schools, and ask what skills might be included in the law degree curriculum and with what effect. We conclude that a client-centred approach to legal education — one which includes the client in the law school curriculum — could make a significant contribution to redressing failures in lawyer/client communication and also make the law degree a more focused and interesting course of study.

A Personal Note on Trademark and Unfair Competition Law before the Lanham Act

I was first exposed to antitrust and trademarks in the 1926 term of the United States Supreme Court, when I served as law clerk to Justice Stone. I had studied neither subject while at law school, a remarkable deficiency in my education having regard for the fact that both subjects were the centerpiece of my teaching, which extended for some forty-five years, and my practice over a period of some seventy years. The Court that term decided two trademark and unfair competition cases, with both opinions written by Justice Holmes.1 I doubt whether these opinions alone would have sufficiently kindled my interest to lead me to devote my entire adult life to these subjects. What aroused my interest was the conversation about trademarks between Justices Stone and Holmes at which I was present. Holmes's tribute to Frank Schechter's The Historical Foundations of the Law Relating to Trade-Marks2 induced me to immerse myself in this subject. I discovered that the first trademark case to be litigated in the federal courts was as late as 1844, over 100 years before the enactment of the Lanham Act.3 The paucity of reported decisions made it possible for a neophyte to read all of the court opinions, which I did when I joined the Columbia faculty in 1927. What I found was rather disconcerting; valuable brands of immense commercial magnetism were not accorded trademark status because of their etymological inferiority, despite the fact that they identified the source of the goods upon which they were affixed. Waterman Fountain Pens, Waltham Watches, and Kellogg Corn Flakes were trade names, not trademarks, and in theory (but not necessarily in fact) accorded limited and inadequate protection. At Columbia, my mentor, Professor Herman Oliphant, who pioneered the field with the first published casebook on trade regulation and who introduced the subject as a separate course in the law school curriculum, invited me to teach it notwithstanding my total unfamiliarity with the subject. He also encouraged me to put out a revised

Cultural Cringe or Lessons for Australian Legal Education?

[Extract] Australia is now developing its own tradition of legal education, as well as its own variant of the common law. Legal education in Australia originated in the demand by the practising legal professions in the various colonies for academic credentials which would increase their status, rather than in more scholarly aspirations. For this reason it has long been different from English legal education, though both focussed on a body of knowledge centred around rules, practices and institutions which had clearly English origins and retained them until quite recently Should Australians (and specifically, Australian law teachers) be interested in two books which examine and provide examples of legal scholarship in England? Perhaps the most striking thing about the two books on English Law Schools is that in both I found only three mentions of teaching method, as distinct from matters of curriculum or scholarship. The clearest reference is in Michael Chesterman’s essay “Legal Explorations in Different Lands”. Chesterman was until recently Dean of Law at the University of NSW, the first Australian law school to question traditional curriculum or teaching methods. He compares the challenge posed respectively by Warwick and UNSW to established traditions; that of Warwick lay in the content of its curriculum, that of UNSW in its methods of teaching. Twining, in his Hamlyn Lectures, refers to instruction in skills (in which he has been a pioneer) as part of an argument that the English Law School curriculum might become more comprehensive, and Wilson, in his rather depressing concluding essay, “Enriching the Study of Law”, mentions it in a similar context.

Women’s Work: The Inclusion of the Voice of Aboriginal Women

Interesting issues arise around the intersection of including women’s work in any law school curriculum and the experience of Aboriginal women. As an Aboriginal woman it seems a natural personal focus for me. The issues that the meeting of women’s work and the experience of Aboriginal women raises are easily transferred through other areas of law. The issue of work and Aboriginal women needs to be looked at in an historical context.

Citizenship and Gender in the Public Law Curriculum: Reclaiming Political Stories and Context

When I was asked to transform my paper delivered at the 1995 Feminist Legal Academic Workshop into a Legal Education Review article, I expanded my outline into a slightly more detailed form. In looking at incorporating “feminist material” into the curriculum I concentrated on citizenship in light of my teaching and research interests in constitutional law, administrative law and migration law. As I have recently begun to think of these matters in my teaching, much of my talk looked at options and possibilities; in many ways it was a list of possible material that could be included in public law courses. On its submission for publication, I was tactfully informed that it “was not suitable for publishing …, as it [was] still very much a conference paper”. I was asked to remove the conversational language, and apart from changing the style, I was also asked to give more detailed information about the material that could be included in the public law courses and how that material could be used. I agree with the latter concerns and this article attempts to advance my conference paper. However, the question of style and content “suitable for a law review article” highlights a critical issue which also impacts on this topic. This article proposes that we recognise that there are different ways of imparting information in the written form, and that the conversational piece is a legitimate part of legal scholarship. Moreover, our curriculum should include creative styles of legal expression for our students to accommodate and encourage difference. This will in turn assist us in our feminist concerns about citizenship and the law school curriculum. Furthermore, it is vital that we consider the teaching of material in ways that include the political contexts within which public law exists. Therefore, in changing my conference paper into this article, I am relying to some extent on some of the scholarship of critical theory; in particular, the embracing of subjectivity of perspective and the avowedly political. Often the method of critical discourse is the narrative, and I am maintaining the narrative style of my original conference paper, relying upon my own teaching experience. My story is therefore seeking to emphasise the message of the critical movement of being concerned with the stories that highlight the different political issues at play. It seeks to show that many stories are excluded from public law forums because of the way we speak about public law. Part of our role as teachers is to reclaim the stories and the greater political contexts within which citizenship is exercised in public law. Sometimes this means listening to and thinking about legal issues in styles and formats that are not considered publishable by mainstream journals.