Undergraduate Legal Education Research Articles

Research on the Reform of Criminal Law Course in Undergraduate Legal Education

There are deficiencies in the construction of the Criminal Law course, such as excessive rationality but insufficient practicality, emphasis on knowledge transmission over ability cultivation, and a focus on traditional crimes while neglecting new types of crimes. To overcome the above shortcomings, it is necessary to adhere to the teaching philosophy of integrating theory and practice, with teaching content based on practical experience and higher than practical experience, steadily promote the reform of teaching methods with the flipped classroom as the main body, substantially promote the construction of a dual teacher team, and reconstruct the curriculum assessment method guided by the OBE concept.

Reform of Undergraduate Legal Education under Interaction with the Unified Qualification Exam for Legal Professionals

Reform of Undergraduate Legal Education under Interaction with the Unified Qualification Exam for Legal Professionals

Communities of inquiry pedagogy in undergraduate courses

ABSTRACT This article proposes that undergraduate legal education should engage students in communities of inquiry where students learn to think critically by working in collaborative groups on a worthwhile research question of their own choosing. The community of inquiry is a return to the idea of the university as a community of scholars, of students capable of critical, creative and caring thought. Students engage in research projects and make their ideas available to others as a contribution to a work of knowledge building. This article describes the use of a community of inquiry approach, both in a core undergraduate law course and in an elective course at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The article explains how an action research methodology was used to explore ways of implementing the communities of inquiry methodology. Surveys and interviews were used to gather data. The article discusses the lessons learned from this project; the most important lessons concerned the benefits that students report from engaging in collaborative inquiry.

The influence of China's Unified Qualification Exam for Legal Professionals on China's legal education and its solution

Under the background of the formal establishment of China's Unified Qualification System for Legal Professionals, the long-standing problem of independence and competition between undergraduate legal education and qualification exam for legal professionals has become more prominent in China. In order to ensure the efficiency of legal education and the accurate identification of qualified legal talents in the qualification exam for legal professionals, we should re-understand the normal relationship between the undergraduate legal education and the qualification exam for legal professionals, connect the undergraduate legal education with the qualification exam for legal professionals, rationally view and actively solve the impact of the qualification exam for legal professionals on the study and employment of law school students .We should adjust the orientation of undergraduate legal education through policy promotion, and reform the qualification exam for legal professionals at the same time, so that the two can be better connected, so as to promote the development of legal education.

The Introduction of Modern Apprenticeship in the Reform of Undergraduate Legal Education

Legal professional talents should have a strong legal knowledge and the ability to deal with legal affairs, but in our country’s past undergraduate law teaching is basically used in the college teaching method, this model is difficult to cultivate a compound, applied legal talents. In order to improve this phenomenon, the concept of law apprenticeship teaching was put forward. This teaching mode not only pays attention to the teaching of law theory but also pays attention to the teaching of law practice, so that students can not only learn the systematic knowledge of law theory, but also participate in the specific legal cases and follow the master to conduct practical learning. The premise of modern apprenticeship system is that the school and the legal department need to establish deep cooperation, and at the same time to cooperate with the reform of the school hours, the reform of the school length and the reform of the curriculum, and should further improve the evaluation system of law teaching.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution and a New Policy Agenda for Undergraduate Legal Education and Training in England And Wales

While the full impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution remains uncertain, it is by now generally accepted that highly intelligent technologies and their applications – such as robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, digitialisation, and big Data – will continue to fundamentally transform all aspects of our occupational and personal lives. Yet, in the realm of higher education policy and specifically with regard to non-STEM disciplines like law, thorough-going engagement with this most recent wave of technological development remains lacking. It is the aim of this article to set a policy agenda for legal education and training that is sensitive to the opportunities and potential negative outfall of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (now exacerbated by COVID-19), while also taking into consideration the distinctive nature of legal education and training in England and Wales. Set against the higher education policy landscape of England and Wales, a number of concrete recommendations are made for bringing legal education and training into the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. These include, for example, a call for the radical transformation of the traditional, linear, and monodisciplinary LLB degree, addressing current and projected skills gaps and skills shortages by way of, inter alia, curriculum reform, and working towards greater mobility of law graduates between different legal jurisdictions and also within one jurisdiction but amongst different roles. These changes are necessary as legal education and training in England and Wales currently leave law graduates ill-equipped for the future labour market and do not adequately value and build on the job-tasks that legal professionals uniquely supply.

A realist evaluation of student use of a virtual reality smartphone application in undergraduate legal education

AbstractThis paper provides a realist evaluation of the Open Justice virtual reality (VR) smartphone app, designed to develop presentation skills for students on an undergraduate legal education module. This work addresses two research questions: what proportion of students engaged with the Open Justice app, and what worked for whom in what circumstances and why? Questionnaire and interviews were conducted and analysed using a realist evaluation approach. This approach is particularly pertinent to the evaluation of how emerging educational technologies are used, as it can point to the potential affordances of a technological intervention, in addition to assessing its current use. In keeping with the realist evaluation approach, data analysis was completed using the context–mechanism–outcome framework. The findings suggest that more than half of students did not engage with the app during their studies, but this was not surprising as it was a pilot project into using VR with our students and such innovations can be difficult to manage in distance education contexts. Those who did engage with it recognised the potential of immersive VR to contribute to legal skills development, but they found the application of the technology, in this context, to be of limited use. By utilising a realist evaluation framework, this study contributes to the emerging field of programme theory‐based evaluations of educational technology, which might form the basis of further research. Practitioner NotesWhat is already known about this topic Smartphone‐based virtual reality technology has developed exponentially and is now widely and cheaply available. Smartphone‐based virtual reality technology has the potential to develop professional skills, and thereby provide a useful addition to experiential learning pedagogies. This is of particular relevance to the development of professional legal skills in the context of clinical legal education. Realist evaluation methodology is increasingly common in health literature to evaluate the impact of education programmes. What this paper adds This is the first empirical study of the use of VR technology to develop professional skills in a distance learning setting. This is the first paper to use realist methodology to evaluate virtual reality technology in legal education. It provides a granular analysis of particular contexts and user responses that can facilitate or inhibit learner engagement with VR technology. Implications for practice and/or policy It provides an analysis of VR used to support teaching and learning, where the students are distance learners—this highlights issues and challenges to be overcome. It provides an evidence base to inform the development of, and further research into, smartphone‐based virtual reality for legal education settings. It provides a detailed example of how realist methodology can be utilised to evaluate educational technology in real‐world settings.

Irish undergraduate legal education

This is the first in a series of three articles outlining threats to and reform of the Irish legal education system. This initial piece is focused on challenges and changes in the provision of unde...

Regulatory Threats to the Law Degree: The Solicitors Qualifying Examination and the Purpose of Law Schools

Two major regulatory changes are affecting the provision of undergraduate legal education in England and Wales. On the one hand, the Qualifying Law Degree is being deregulated, meaning law schools are free to make significant changes to how and what they teach. On the other hand, higher education in England has seen a significant overhaul through the creation of the Office for Students, which treats students as consumers. Now more than ever, law schools need to ask themselves existential questions which will not only test their continued relevance or indeed viability within the ‘market’ for higher education, but also the status of the discipline of law as a whole. The regulatory landscape may indeed present a significant threat, but it is also an opportunity to reflect on what law schools are for, and consequently what changes could result from the academic freedom that comes with deregulation. Whilst different law schools will interpret their mission differently, they should caution against either generalised inertia or succumbing to an outcomes-oriented provision that simply prepares students for the new Solicitors Qualifying Examination. Instead, law schools will find their proper purpose in critical reflection and academic self-grounding, providing undergraduate students with a ‘question everything’ mentality, and showing them that law is something to be experienced and not merely learnt.

Connectivity, confidentiality and confidence: Key issues in the provision of online pro bono activities

The provision of pro bono activities for law students has become an established feature of the undergraduate legal education landscape in Law Schools in the United Kingdom (“UK”) and beyond, providing the experiential elements of clinical legal education programmes. Pro bono activities conducted online, or utilising and enhanced by technologies in other ways (for example, through the development of a mobile phone application providing legal guidance), are increasingly becoming a part of this offering, reflecting wider shifts within legal practice and society and an increasing recognition of the importance of digital literacy skills. This paper will situate these forms of online and technologically-enhanced pro bono activities both within the wider context of contemporary clinical legal education and also as a part of broader professional and societal shifts. It will explore a variety of innovative approaches being taken internationally, including work done by The Open University’s Open Justice Centre in the UK, before moving on to focus on a number of key challenges and opportunities which may arise through the increasing provision of these new forms of pro bono activities by Law Schools. These include the potential and pitfalls of the technology involved, issues with confidentiality (particularly in the context of online legal advice) and the issue of how to foster trust in the online environment. The paper will conclude with a number of suggestions for areas requiring further research and discussion to enable contemporary clinicians to fully utilise the potential of online and technologically-enhanced pro bono activities.

Transforming legal education through emotions

AbstractLaw has traditionally viewed emotions as the enemies of rationality and reason, irrational and potentially dangerous forces which must be suppressed or disregarded. This separation and enmity has been mirrored within undergraduate legal education in England and Wales, with its rigid focus on seemingly impartial and objective analysis and notions such as the ubiquitous ‘thinking like a lawyer’. This paper will argue that attempts to disregard or suppress emotions within the law school are both misguided and destined to fail. It will explore the integral part emotions play within effective legal learning, the development of legal skills, and the well-being of both law students and legal academics. It will also consider how developments in legal scholarship and the evolving climate of higher education generally offer some potential, but also pitfalls, for the future acknowledgment and incorporation of emotions within undergraduate legal education in England and Wales. Bodies of literature relating to not only legal education, but also education generally, psychology and philosophy will be drawn on to demonstrate that emotions have a potentially transformative power within legal education, requiring them to be acknowledged and utilised within a more holistic, integrated form of law degree.

Online collaboration as a pedagogical approach to learning and teaching undergraduate legal education

ABSTRACTLegal education is in a period of rapid development driven by changing industry demands and developing technologies. This paper will describe an innovative pilot study which utilises new technologies to provide an alternative mode of teaching and learning to meet growing industry demands for graduates who are technologically savvy and have strong communication and collaboration skills. The pilot study redesigns a law unit combining a more traditional approach with an approach in which online collaboration is critical to student learning as a teaching and assessment tool. After completing an online collaborative activity as part of their assessment for the unit, students completed an online survey to identify their perspectives of the online collaborative experience. The online survey data was analysed to identify common themes and the experiences of students are shared in this paper. The paper provides an example of how instructors might take advantage of a learning design process, online tools and infrastructure to develop educational experiences which promote communication and collaboration within the law discipline. It will also include five recommendations to consider when including online collaboration in unit design for law students.

LL.M. in India: A Critical Review

The Masters Programme in Law in India has recently gained popularity for several reasons. Notwithstanding its rise in demand, the manner in which the said programme is conducted in law colleges in India has remained unchanged over several decades. Unlike undergraduate legal education, post-graduate legal education, especially the Masters programme has not undergone marked improvement. The National Law School reform has not percolated to the Masters programme in law to the extent desired. There are various reasons for this state of affairs. Some of them are lack of focus or goal, non-availability of quality faculty members, parochial goal setting of the LL.M. programme, and so on. The recent reforms in reducing the duration of the Masters programme has been welcomed by many, but several persons have expressed their reservations on the duration, especially as regards equipping the post-graduate students with enough skills which ought to be imparted in the post-graduate course. This paper argues that unless overreaching reforms are introduced in post graduate legal education, India will always lag behind developed nations in terms of quality of legal research and pedagogy. The paper was presented in the Conference on Legal Education in a Globalised World, Central Law College, Salem (17-18 September 2016).

“A part to play”: the value of role-play simulation in undergraduate legal education

This article explores the argument for increased student participation in experiential learning approaches within the UK undergraduate law curriculum. It is supported by the findings of a very small-scale research study undertaken by the writer into law students’ perceptions of the efficacy of role-play simulation as a means of studying mediation, in an optional credit-based module within the final year of a UK undergraduate qualifying law degree. In order to provide situational context, the first part of this article will briefly address the experiential learning possibilities for undergraduate law students, a discussion of the study involving qualitative research methodology, which was used to demonstrate that role-play simulation as a method of experiential learning has a place within the UK undergraduate law curriculum. The final part of this article will consider the findings of the study which demonstrated that, inter alia, role-play simulation can be motivational, helps to build student confidence, enables deeper learning, assists graduate skills acquisition and arguably enhances employability. Based on the findings of this study and other empirical evidence, the article suggests that greater emphasis could be placed on experiential approaches such as role-play simulation for credit-based law courses, including those “core” foundational courses which form part of the undergraduate qualifying law degree in the UK, but achievement of this aspiration is not without its challenges.

Information Age to Interaction Age in Legal Education: How Far Have We Progressed?

This paper analyses undergraduate legal education in the United Kingdom (with some reference to other countries) in the last 50 years in relation to teaching methods. In the 1960s the emphasis was on the lecturer imparting legal information by means of face-to-face lectures. This was an Information Age with legal education being teacher-centred. The lecturer was the expert whose role was to ensure that students were taught the necessary legal content. The beginnings of the Interaction Age came with the setting up of tutorials/seminars. However, they were mainly teacher-centred, where the tutor gave a mini lecture. The interaction was mainly between the tutor and students. A development of the Interaction Age came with the recognition that in tutorials/seminars the teacher should be a facilitator of learning between students, interacting with each other. The early forms of computer-assisted learning consisted of imparting information to students. Initially, the internet was used mainly to develop websites and place lecture notes and powerpoint slides. Some websites contained interactive self-assessment tutorials, the interaction being only between the learner and the content, placed by the lecturer. The Interaction Age using technology only began when interactive devices such as online discussion forums, chat rooms, video conferencing were utilised to enable interaction between students and between students and lecturers, as co-participants in the learn in process. The literature review indicates that there is little effective use of interactive technological devices to assist learning in higher education institutions providing face-to-face teaching. The Interaction Age has made little progress, with pockets of innovation in a few institutions. The chief obstacles to progress are lecturers still in the Information Age and passive students who wish to be taught rather than to actively learn. In most face-to-face institutions (including those adopting blended learning) lecturers impart information. Students only engage in interaction to co-construct knowledge where the interaction is part of the assessment. The research methodology is to conduct a literature review on teaching methods from the sixties to the present day to investigate the extent to which the teaching is teacher-centred with little interaction between lecturer and students in traditional lectures. The methodology is theoretical and exploratory. The research perspective is historical. The literature was selected to throw light on the teaching methods in the Information Age and the methods in the Interaction Age.

One size fits all? Multiple intelligences and legal education

ABSTRACTThis article argues that teaching and learning methodologies used in undergraduate law degrees are gradually shifting. The traditional model relied on a largely standardised, “one size fits all” approach which assumed that developing legal reasoning through attendance at lectures and participation in tutorials and seminars would produce a successful lawyer. However, today’s law schools are adapting to a large and diverse body of law students, many of whom will move on to careers outside the legal profession. This is being recognised by an increasingly pluralistic approach within undergraduate legal education, aided in no small measure by a greater focus on skills. This article will discuss the theory of multiple intelligences, which rejects the idea of a single measure of intelligence and instead identifies a number of different intelligences with both biological and cultural underpinnings. It is argued that acknowledging these multiple intelligences and using them as an organising concept to vary and diversify teaching and learning methodologies could help to further avoid the “one size fits all” approach and enhance the student experience.

Screencasting ethics and values: teaching contemporary legal issues and collective legal values through live screencasting

In the post-LETR environment, many questions still currently hang over the position of ethics and legal values in undergraduate legal education. The clear disjunction between the centrality of ethics in the profession and its absence from education was highlighted by the review as an area of proposed improvement. Furthermore, our students continually seek new mediums to engage with important legal subjects and issues, especially in the age of social media. With this in mind, Plymouth Law School has begun to fill this lacuna through using contemporary video resources to encourage consideration of legal values. This article evaluates live screencasting of current affairs to incite critical reflection upon collective legal values.

Masters of our Destiny – The Integration of law clinic into post graduate Masters provision

<p>Increasingly students are looking to their undergraduate law degrees to do more than provide them with a qualification which acts a ‘stepping stone’ to further legal vocational training. The provision of law degrees across the sector includes both qualifying and non-qualifying degrees where the study of law is combined with other subjects, vocational and non-vocational. Not all students who obtain a qualifying law degree will continue to the vocational stage of training, but all degrees need to address the employability agenda, and law students in particular need to consider future career aspirations early on in their degree.</p><p>Clinical legal education as a teaching methodology has received considerable academic attention for the benefits student engagement can yield in enhancing the overall student learning experience This paper briefly reviews the benefits of undergraduate clinical legal education (CLE) and considers the benefits of developing this at post graduate level in a Masters in Law programme This paper considers the distinction between the two approaches and the need for a different approach to the provision of a law clinic module within a postgraduate law Masters programme, identifying a possible model of delivery.</p><p>The paper further presents some of the potential challenges in developing and maintaining this provision over time and attempts to offer some insight into how these have been considered in the development of a postgraduate law clinic module at the University of Derby.</p>

Law Clinics in Taiwan: Can Clinical Legal Education Succeed in this Civil Law Jurisdiction with an Undergraduate Legal Education System?

Law school clinics are an important part of legal education around the world, but there are still many places without clinics, including Taiwan. It is important for Taiwanese legal educators to consider whether and how clinical education might fit into the Taiwanese legal education system. When discussing clinical education, several concerns are commonly raised: are undergraduate students capable of doing and benefitting from clinical work? Is student practice legal? What effect does student practice have on quality of representation? How does a clinic fit with the existing apprenticeship program? Who would teach a clinic? How do clinics fit with the legal academy’s view of itself and its purposes? Can Taiwanese law schools afford to operate clinics? Ultimately, none of these concerns presents a serious obstacle to the introduction of clinical education. Taiwanese law schools should introduce clinics to their curriculum to give students the opportunity to enjoy the many benefits of clinical education.

Academic Resistance to the Neoliberal University

As with other professions, the declining rates of recruitment and retention of lawyers in rural and regional Australia is of significant concern. Whilst the causes of this vary between communities, common depictions of the rural and regional lawyer’s role indicate that employment as a lawyer in such areas is characterised by unique personal and professional challenges. Nonetheless, employment as a rural and regional lawyer also offers practitioners rewarding opportunities and lifestyle benefits. Research from other disciplines indicates that the challenges inherent in rural and regional professional practice may be alleviated, and benefits more easily harnessed, via place conscious discipline-specific curriculum that sensitises tertiary students to, and prepares them for, the rural and regional career context. Largely oriented towards substantive content to satisfy external accrediting bodies, undergraduate legal education does not typically acknowledge the ‘places’ in which graduates will practice as professionals. This article argues however that there is scope to incorporate place within legal education, and documents an innovative curriculum development project which embeds place consciousness to better prepare law students for employment in rural and regional legal practice. Drawing upon methods from other disciplines, the project team designed a curriculum package which aims to sensitise students to the rural and regional legal practice context, and equip them with the skills to overcome challenges and take advantage of the opportunities available in a rural or regional professional career.