Nelson, J --- "In This Issue" [2005] LegEdDig 1; (2005) 13(3) Legal Education Digest 2

In This Issue

Dr John Nelson

[2005] LegEdDig 1; (2005) 13(3) Legal Education Digest 2

The review article in this issue is a short account of Teaching the law school curriculum, a law teaching resource book published last year for teachers of core subjects and containing contributions from 170 legal academics in the United States and Canada. In the opinion of the editor, it contains a wealth of material and suggested techniques which will help the responsive teacher to create a teaching/learning environment in which students can maximise their performance.

There are a total of six articles under Skills, all of which come from a thematic issue of the Journal of Legal Education in 2004 on dispute resolution. Menkel-Meadow’s contention is we must look beyond conventional legal processes, which are often inadequate for a fuller satisfaction of human needs and interests, to developments in the parallel fields of legal dispute resolution and multidisciplinary conflict resolution. Whereas Brown looks at the role of economic analysis with respect to dispute resolution, Gadlin reflects upon the possible contributions from the social sciences and Guthrie examines the insights from cognitive psychology. Welsh admonishes teachers of ADR not to neglect the role of procedural and social justice in dispute resolution. Finally, Chew suggests that culture is the ‘perception-shaping lens through which we experience culture’ and that the interaction between culture and conflict has a role in traditional law teaching, especially in subjects such as dispute resolution.

Under Clinical Legal Education there are four articles. Kenny, Styles & Zariski describe an exercise they devised to test the proposition that exploring the process of reflection on the part of students can add to their learning in the law clinic. Batt & Katz maintain that periodic evaluation of student progress with regard to professional development issues is a vital component of the clinical process. Blanco & Buhai suggest a range of efficacious techniques for training externship field supervisors and students and identify four common barriers to effective supervision in an off-campus field setting. In an article on the ethics of law school clinic students as student-lawyers, Joy proposes that through well-structured clinical experiences law schools can provide students with the opportunity to confront ethical issues in their role as lawyers and under the supervision of experienced teachers, while holding them to the same ethical standard as is expected of lawyers.

Teaching Methods & Media has two articles. Corbin’s describes her growing recognition, when given the responsibility of teaching a new web-based course across campuses, that a course carefully designed to use the tools offered by an online system can be both pedagogically sound and even more successful than the traditional methods of lecture and physical tutorial sessions. Matthew explores the difficulties that have traditionally arisen in fostering teamwork skills in external students through an analysis of an assessment model trialled with a student cohort enrolled in a third year undergraduate law unit.

Amongst the other articles digested for this issue, Sage confronts what he calls the contribution of secularised legal education to the moral crisis of the profession. He contends that this process of secularisation, fathered by Langdell and Holmes and compounded by the American Bar Association, has had a lasting impact on America’s legal institutions through the spread of legal positivism with the legal profession being captivated by the notion that there is no external authority or accountability in the law beyond that which is judicially acknowledged. How to deal with the disturbing decline in the bar pass rate is the topic of an article by Day under Law Schools. He proposes that law schools should accept the responsibility for assisting their students to pass the bar examination and suggests ways in which this improvement can be effected. Finally, under the heading Gender Issues, Torrey looks at the negative impact that the Socratic method has had on the learning of women and minority groups.