Nelson, J --- "In This Issue" [2004] LegEdDig 33; (2004) 13(1) Legal Education Digest 2

In This Issue

Dr John Nelson

[1993] LegEdDig 11; (2004) 13(1) Legal Education Digest 2

This issue contains a review article of a book published this year by Fiona Cownie, from the University of Hull Law School in the United Kingdom, on a research project she conducted, using semi-structured interviews, into the culture and identities of legal academics. The purpose of the study she describes as to provide an extended analysis of the ‘lived experience’ of legal academics teaching and researching law in English universities.

The bulk of the articles digested for this issue have been allotted to three headings: curriculum, gender issues and judicial education. Under the first, McCrimmon makes out a persuasive case for the introduction of mandatory pro bono coursework into the law school curriculum. Cain describes the experience of offering a class on emotional intelligence in an internship course and argues for introducing the concept of emotional intelligence into the law school curriculum. Chanock, in a paper delivered at an AALS international conference, considers whether there is a common core for the transnational lawyer and profiles a course he teaches designed, not to teach students how to be practitioners in a transnational legal world, but to sensitise them to the idea of law and legal systems as cultures. Finally, under Curriculum, Weinberg & Harding look at the benefits of interdisciplinary teaching, not only as a means of dismantling the walls around academic disciplines, but also to help professionals to learn about and evaluate their own discipline-specific knowledge base within a collaborative interdisciplinary team, while respecting and acknowledging the limits and strengths of their own and the other disciplines involved.

Under Gender Issues there are four articles taken from a recent issue of the Journal of Legal Education. Rhode surveys the phases in the changing status of women in legal education over the past 30 years and outlines what needs to be achieved to equalise their opportunities. Merritt & Reskin suggest a number of measures which must be taken in order for women to achieve positions of leadership within the academy. According to Vaughns, women of colour in the legal academy bear the burden of both identities and the privilege of neither. She proposes that their heterogeneity in legal education and the variety of their experiences offer the potential for rich collaboration scholastically and pedagogically. Bashi & Iskander propose a methodology for studying gender in the law school. They recognise that the differences in the way male and female students experience law school and are treated by faculty are subtle and that a carefully designed research study is needed to uncover these differences.

Among the three articles to be found under Judicial Education, Gleeson, Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, briefly reviews the history of judicial education in the common law system and contrasts this with the administration of justice in civil law countries. He points out that judicial education and development should be a subject for wider concern for government and the general community, given the current push to recruit from outside the ranks of experienced advocates and the fact that increasing specialisation and complexity of legal practice has resulted in newly appointed judges often being ill equipped for the breadth of their judicial role. Goldring suggests that, if judges are to become more reflective, the aims of judicial education should include devising ways in which they can more accurately determine whether or not they have achieved the standards of performance they have set for themselves. Le Brun points out the centrality in judicial education of workshops, seminars and conferences, which share characteristics that can limit their capacity to be fully effective learning environments. She contends that these traditional delivery modes can be significantly enhanced by the provision of online learning support for judges.

Under Skills, Wolff describes how German legal education and practice in the area of private law is dominated by a specific problem solving methodology which is very different from the common law approach. Teachers contains an article by Gava criticising the claim by certain judges who appear to take an openly instrumentalist approach to their role that law school reviews are a boon to them in their work, maintaining that this may come at too great a cost to legal academics and law schools. Finally, Sturm & Guinier outline an experimental teaching approach with building what they call multiracial learning communities in the law school classroom. These encompass a group-learning practice within the classroom as well as reinforce the capacities of the individuals within that community. They aim to demonstrate that the principles of power sharing, creative experimentation and critical reframing have enabled them to transform conflict into a tool for learning.