Legal Education In Australia Research Articles

Leslie Zines — from a Personal Perspective

A personal tribute to Professor Leslie Zines by a close friend and colleague is presented. The author recalls Zines' contribution to legal education in Australia as well as the respect with which the professor is remembered by all his former students and colleagues. He particularly recalls Zines' views on the kind of reasoning that must be used in the judicial interpretation of the Australian Constitution.

Reform of Professional Legal Education at the University of Hong Kong

[Extract] The purpose of this article is to describe, evaluate and reflect upon certain interactive teaching strategies used in the large lecture theatre environment. The article will describe the teaching context in which interactive strategies have been introduced, and will outline and discuss the teaching strategies and aids used. Finally, the effectiveness of the strategies in improving student learning will be evaluated, and some personal reflections on the teaching experience recorded. The major premise underpinning the article and the exercise, the subject of this article, is that the object of good teaching is to promote high quality learning on the part of the student. I adopt a framework for teaching which embraces the idea of teaching as the fostering and promoting of student learning. This approach is based largely on the work done by Paul Ramsden, amongst others, which has been enhanced in the context of legal education in Australia by writers such as Richard Johnstone and Marlene Le Brun. According to this approach, good teaching involves three things: understanding student learning; appreciating both the primary importance, and the best means, of fostering and promoting learning, and having the necessary skills to do so; and the practice of constant reflection.

What Do They Learn When They Learn Legal Ethics?

This paper will discuss incorporating the teaching of legal ethics into the first year undergraduate program of the law degree. Teaching legal ethics in law schools is a subject that has generated renewed interest in recent years. In 2000, the Council of Australian Law Deans endorsed the recommendation of the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC), that the development of a deep appreciation of ethical standards and professional responsibility be one of the main aims of university legal education in Australia.3 There is little discussion by the ALRC in its report as to what is meant by ethical standards, and how this “deep appreciation of ethical standards and professional responsibility” should be taught.

Packing Them in the Aisles: Making Use of Moots as Part of Course Delivery

Law as a discipline struggles as much as, or perhaps more than, any other discipline in its attempts to reconcile its close historic connections to professional practice with its current location in a university environment. Should law schools focus on producing graduates who are “practice-ready” or make available a broad, contextual education for their students in line with the academic standards of the wider university? The overarching issue in debates about legal education in Australia has been: “what is the nature of a ‘university’ legal education?” The key issue is: should law schools be driven by market requirements or by more idealistic educational values?

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.

Integrating Procedure, ADR and Skills: New Teaching and Learning for New Dispute Resolution Processes

For some time, I have been interested in clinical legal education in the broadest sense, as a method of teaching and learning, and as a substantive focus for teaching and research.1 As a method, it incorporates the key elements of structured experience and reflection, elaborated below.2 As a substantive focus, it looks at what lawyers really do and what really happens in practice. I have regularly argued that both aspects of clinical legal education can and should be introduced into the LLB, even in quite large classes. Clinical legal education methods and insights can be effectively combined with conventional legal education to further the goals of legal education. This paper elaborates on those teaching and learning ideas, in the specific context of teaching civil procedure. Some background about the goals of legal education and the changing patterns of legal education in Australia is necessary. This leads to a recognition of the importance of addressing the changing dispute resolution processes in Australia and the skills and understanding law graduates need, especially a broad grounding in values and ethics. The second part of the paper describes a program designed to integrate theoretical, critical and practical approaches to the formal rules of civil litigation. As well as covering formal rules and practices, this program considered the reality of settlement in litigation and examined mediation and other forms of dispute resolution, in light of ideas about the nature of civil justice and the moral and ethical dimensions of legal practice.

Law without tears. Diane Kirkby (ed), Sex power and justice: historical perspectives on law in Australia

In the introduction to this collection of 17 essays, Diane Kirkby describes her scepticism about the law's potential as a mechanism for social change. Like Carol Smart warning us of the seductive power of law (Smart 1989:160) Kirkby describes her ambivalence about a reliance on law's power to right wrongs and bring about justice. But she sees the essays in this collection as sharing a commitment to social justice and expresses a hope that the collection may itself provide an impetus for change. By situating legal practice in its social and historical contexts these contributions to the historiography of law may be capable of subverting law's claims to universality and timeless validity. Kirkby sees the book as providing a resource for the new, broadened legal education in Australia and at the very least the essays, divided into the catch-all themes of Sexuality, Punishment, Family and Citizenship and the State, provide the reader with a starting point for further research or a useful overview of areas of law and legal history in Australia. The chapters that perhaps go further than this are those that articulate more clearly Kirkby's disquiet. These are the chapters that describe the uneasy alliances between feminists and moral campaigners, the difficulty feminist activists have had in dealing with the implications of intersectional identity, the inability of (legislative) reform to provide benefits for all women and the sometimes unexpected results of feminist campaigns for change.

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.

The Law School Fund: ‘Post-Pearce’ Collection Development at the Law Library of the University of Western Australia

ABSTRACTThis article traces the history of collection development at the Law Library of the University of Western Australia in the wake of criticisms of the collection contained in the 1987 Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission discipline assessment of legal education in Australia (the Pearce Report). In particular, it focuses on the expenditure of the Law School Fund, a sum of $1 million raised in order to address the problems highlighted in the Pearce Report. The article considers, inter alia, some of the difficulties in disposing of a large sum of acquisitions money in a short space of time.

Graduate Education in Australian Law Schools: Some Recent Developments

The paper examines some of the factors currently shaping graduate coursework in legal education in Australia. There is some suggestion that the undergraduate law degree is likely to become more generalist and that specialization will occur at the graduate level with professional registration to follow. The shift from the somewhat insular and self-regulating culture of Australian law schools to a powerful mix of state and market-controlled environment has occurred in a very short space of time. The impact of graduate studies programmes on the undergraduate degree is yet to be assessed as graduate courses become significant sources of income, differentiation and status for the established schools.

An Integrated Approach to Teaching and Learning Law: The Use of Student Peer Mentor Groups to Improve the Quality of Student Learning in Contracts

Increasing student numbers and decreasing education funding threatens to perpetuate a number of significant, interrelated problems in undergraduate legal education. These problems are epitomised by the following characteristics of teaching and learning which we believe are not uncommon in Australian legal education: Teaching occurs in large classes (which are at their largest in the crucial first year). Students are given little opportunity for interaction, self-direction, cooperative learning, or for debating ideas among their peers. Students often feel alienated, conscious of their perceived “lack of knowledge” and, in spite of their obvious success in previous study, concerned about meeting the high expectations placed on them. Teaching methods centre on lectures as a focus for transmitting instrumental knowledge, supplemented by seminars or tutorials, which often develop into mini-lectures. Students constantly look to the academic for “answers” as to “what is the law”; they often commit the resulting information to memory and regurgitate it in examination scripts, before forgetting it. The students move on to the next year, often with their first love of learning lost. Legal educators are faced not only with these problems but also with growing demands to address issues concerning the quality of teaching and learning in their subjects. And while traditional methods such as the lecture and seminar continue to dominate undergraduate legal education, increasing use is being made of less traditional, more innovative teaching and learning methods, exemplified by the use of materials-based learning (using computers and other media), the development of real life as well as simulated clinical situations and the introduction of more active learning methods within the classroom. It was against this background of well recognised problems1 and the search for solutions, that the Contracts subject in the Queensland University of Technology’s LLB course was redesigned.2 This commitment to doing something about the problems outlined above coincided with a major review of the LLB curriculum, making the environment ripe for developing teaching and learning methods more appropriate for first-year law students. This paper reports on this redesign, first by considering the total teaching and learning environment of the subject and then by focusing on that aspect of the new environment which we consider unique to legal education in Australia — the student peer mentor group.

Recent Statistical Trends in Australian Legal Education

[Extract] Law Schools The central message of the Pearce Report on Australian Law Schools was that legal education in Australia is being run on the cheap, and this is a Bad Thing. The moral for Vice Chancellors, University Councils and Governments, however, is that legal education in Australia can be run on the cheap, and this is an Absolutely Splendid Thing. In 1960, there were six university law schools in Australia — one in each state capital. By the mid-1970s the number had doubled, with second law schools established in Victoria and Queensland, three new law schools in New South Wales, and another established at the Australian National University in Canberra. One of the law schools in each of Queensland and New South Wales was established in an Institute of Technology, foreshadowing the end of the binary divide in higher education. By the mid-1990s, the number of law schools will double again. New law schools have already been established, or are about to be established, at seven more public universities: Murdoch University, Wollongong University, Newcastle University, the University of the Northern Territory, Flinders University, Griffith University and James Cook University. La Trobe University’s well-known legal studies department is also set to begin offering LLB degrees for the first time, in addition to the BA in Legal Studies. Similarly, the legal studies group within the Business and Commerce Faculty of the University of New England, in Armidale, NSW, is currently taking active steps towards the creation of a separate law school. The University also has a branch in Coffs Harbour and is one of the leaders in distance education, so that there are arguments in favour of this move despite the already crowded field. The conversion of the legal studies department into a law school at the University of Canberra is also strongly rumoured. Further, there is also likely to be pressure soon to establish a law school at the University of Western Sydney, which already houses some legal studies departments at its separate campuses and is located in a heavily populated region which is poorly served by professional faculties (and services).