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Carmichael, J --- "[P]Lucky Jane Et Al: Ideal Types in the Legal Academy?" [2005] LegEdDig 46; (2005) 14(1) Legal Education Digest 18

[P]lucky Jane et al: Ideal Types in the Legal Academy?

J Carmichael

[2005] LegEdDig 46; (2005) 14(1) Legal Education Digest 18

14 Legal Educ Rev 2, 2004, pp 93–126

This article started as a response to a decision by the Law School at Deakin University, Australia, to embark upon a major recruitment of new staff. To date it would seem that, whilst there is no dearth of sources about what law schools should teach, or on the content and structure of the curriculum, research on the selection and formation of academics is somewhat less common. This is changing. In this article, the writer attempts a different approach to the interview studies referred to above. Through the construction of ‘ideal types’ of legal academics, an attempt is made to convey a range of experiences and contributions to the legal academy.

It is often difficult for neophyte legal academics just coming to grips with demanding and often concurrent teaching, administration and research tasks to also become readily familiar with the major debates in legal education and pedagogy. The three archetypal law teachers chosen include a dedicated and successful career academic, an early career changer who became a practising lawyer for a time and then an experienced law teacher, and a retired judge who has had a long commitment to legal education and who now has the time, as well as the inclination, to do something about it.

After graduating from a selective girl’s high school, Jane Smythe attended Melbourne University in the late 1970s, graduating LLB (Hons) and BA. Jane soon realised she wished to be an academic. However, her mentor advised her to do her Articles and to be admitted to the Bar as he had always regretted only being academically qualified in law. Following her Articles, Jane decided to study overseas. Following her professor’s advice she took an LLM at Harvard. Back in Australia, in 1984, Jane was appointed to a tenured lecturing position in an established law school. She taught a basic torts course and a very popular elective in her speciality, comparative media law.

Jane taught her subjects effectively, albeit always from a prepared script which over the years she efficiently updated to the extent required by recent developments. However, Jane put her real efforts into research, university committee work and outside consultancies. Jane’s real priority was her research. Consultancies, including a stint over five years as a part-time Law Reform Commissioner, ensured she was well known and generally well regarded by the wider academic community. Within a few years, lectures were an exception in her foundation law subjects. She had established a consortium with other law schools to establish self-paced instructional packages based on a common curriculum shared by the participating law schools.

Jane’s heavy emphasis on technology for what she calls ‘transmission’ or ‘informational teaching’ has met with mixed responses. Jane is also opposed to too much teaching of legal procedure in universities. This is perhaps not surprising given her own professional formation was at a time when Australian law schools had shifted from an apprenticeship model to a view that the study of law should be a form of liberal education. She maintains that the realities of the global market for legal services means that no longer can an Australian law school think of itself as merely fulfilling the narrowly conceived professional concerns of the local law society.

Rick Palmer has just turned 50 and is a senior lecturer in a law school that also teaches business law to commerce students. As a law student, Rick’s academic record had been somewhat patchy. As a part-time student for his first two years, he had put his effort and limited time into those subjects that interested him — constitutional, family and child welfare law.

Rick became a practitioner, but, being something of a perfectionist, was often frustrated by the multiple demands involved in running a legal practice and felt there was never enough time to research legal points adequately. Along the way, he took a few LLM coursework subjects, deliberately choosing those subjects with examinations as the sole or at least the major form of assessment, so that he could cram desperately towards the end of the semester. Rick did well enough in his LLM so that, combined with his practical legal experience and teacher training, he was appointed at the age of 37 to a new ‘post-Dawkins’ law school.

Rick’s teaching duties over the last few years seem to have stabilised and consist of being Unit Coordinator of a first-year semester-length Introduction to Business Law unit, taking one of the two-hour weekly seminars for the Contract Law subject that spans the entire academic year and teaching an advanced semester-length elective unit called Perspectives on Family and Child Welfare Law’. Rick sees his role as the coordinator of the foundation business law subject as giving good lectures and managing a team consisting of one other tenured staff member, a team of tutors and an administration officer.

In his business law lectures, Rick uses PowerPoint slides, posted in advance on the intranet program used by his university. He has a reputation for giving good lectures, with plenty of use of both verbal and visual humour, repeats major points in at least three different ways, gives clear overviews of new material, good summaries of what has been covered and arranges his timetable to have time after lectures to answer any immediate questions students have.

Overall, Rick believes the key to running this large unit is to be well organised, whilst being sufficiently flexible to provide some spontaneity. Rick also thinks his teaching in this legal overview unit is rated so highly because it overlaps with the more in-depth teaching he is involved with in taking two of the full-year Contract Law seminar streams for first-year LLB students.

Overall, it is hard pin down with any precision just what makes Rick a good teacher. He is passionate about his subjects, is genuinely interested in his students, sets high standards but gives clear guidance and personal assistance. Even in his business law survey course, he encourages students to look for the logic and meaning behind various topics so that then the detail will look after itself. Rick has cut back on his workload to have more time with his family, he still gets a ‘buzz’ from the youth and energy of his students, enjoys their brightness and the interplay of debate and is puzzled that some of his colleagues find law students arrogant. He likes the flexibility and time-shifting possibilities that academic life still offers and helped by his oldest child, an IT consultant, he has become adept at using the Internet to communicate to his off-campus students.

Nigel is a retired Judge who ‘came home’ to Melbourne a few years ago from his interstate appointment. After university, Nigel developed a good practice at the Bar in the technical areas of building and intellectual property cases. Nigel was a highly regarded judge, was an active contributor to functions arranged by the Law Society and, as a corrective to the concentration of most Evidence texts on criminal law examples, he wrote Advocacy and Evidence in Technical Litigation. Last year, Nigel, now retired, accepted an appointment as a part-time adjunct professor at one of Victoria’s law schools. Nigel relishes the work and the opportunity it gives him to mix with young students and to pass on the benefits of his experience.

Nigel sees the future of law teaching and legal academic life as needing to be both more radical and conservative. By radical he means students must be encouraged to develop a deeper perspective on the class and gendered nature of the law. On the other hand, he realises that although most law students may choose never to practise or may leave practice quite quickly, he thinks it important that law schools increase their teaching of legal practice and procedure. He thinks most students wish to have the option of entering practice and also prefer to defer a decision about the precise direction of their legal careers for as long as possible.

We have considered the careers of three putative ideal types in the legal academy. Jane has specialised in an academic career from the start, and gone the PhD route that has long been far more common in other disciplines than in law, although this is starting to change. Rick changed careers early and enlivens his classes with anecdotes from his legal practice. Concerned that some of his anecdotes are now a little dated, Rick for the last two years has worked pro bono at a community legal centre and is now also on its board of management. Nigel has come to academia later but still in time to enrich the learning of the law for many students as well as continuing his own journey in the law.

Perhaps all that can be said with some confidence is that the debates about the purposes and forms of legal education will continue and that there is no one ‘correct’ career pattern, but rather that a law school, like another place, has ‘many mansions’. If this is so, the academy will require many gifts and abilities in pursuing the challenging and changing task of ensuring students have the chance to acquire a high quality legal education — whatever that means, or may come to mean. The safest prediction is that debates over the ideal forms of legal education and the curricula required to implement such visions will continue and that within that debate there will be roles in the nation’s law schools for the Janes, Ricks and Nigels of the future.


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