Skip to content

cearta.ie

the Irish for rights

Menu
  • About
  • Privacy Policy
  • Disclaimer
  • Contact
  • Research

Category: Legal Education

Too many guides, not enough style

30 August, 201027 August, 2010
| No Comments
| law school, Legal Education, Legal Journals and Law Reviews

New Zealand style guide cover, via the NZ Law Foundation websiteMy previous post on the advent of the Irish Law Journal led to some quite interesting discussion about the nature of citation styles and how crowded the market for legal journals in Ireland is.

By way of supplement, I see that 15 Lambton Quay records the final publication of New Zealand’s uniform style guide. I blogged about it at the proposal stage here. Up until now, Law schools, law firms, publishers and courts have been using their own idiosyncratic and confusing styles when referring to legal material. Now, New Zealand’s six law schools, three main legal publishers, major law reviews, and a number of courts, including the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal, have adopted the guide this year. From the 15 Lambton Quay website [with added links]:

The Guide was launched by Justice John McGrath. A uniform guide has been a long time coming! .. The new guide is the result of the combined efforts of many across the profession. Justice Chambers of the Court of Appeal spearheaded the project … The guide was only made possible through generous funding from the New Zealand Law Foundation. …

A web-based version of the guide has been made available on the New Zealand law Foundation’s website.…

Read More »

Making the point

24 August, 201029 July, 2011
| 3 Comments
| Central Applications Office, Irish Society, Legal Education

Central Applications Office animated logo, via their siteMany things about Ireland bemuse visitors to our shores. Two of the most difficult to explain are our electoral system and the programme by which third level places are allocated. I’ll leave the former to other election anoraks for the time being, but the latter is much in the news this week, so I’ll try to give a simple account of how it works.

The Central Applications Office (logo, above left) processes all applications to first year undergraduate courses in the country’s various third level institutions. In early summer, students at the end of their secondary (high) school careers sit a state examination, and the results are published in early August. During the course of that final year, most of the students will have filled in a list of their preferred third level courses and returned it to the CAO. In mid-August, the CAO assign university places to students based on their exam results.

Allocation of places is simply a function of demand and supply. A third level institution will inform the CAO of the number of places in a given course, and the CAO’s computer will allot places on the course to the highest qualified applicants who had applied for that course.…

Read More »

Fourth Legal Education Symposium – more information

14 April, 201023 June, 2011
| 1 Comment
| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops, Legal Education

University of Limerick sundial, via UL siteAs I’ve already posted here, the Fourth Legal Education Symposium will be hosted by the School of Law, University of Limerick in the Kemmy Business School on Friday, 14 May 2010.

Due to the generous sponsorship of Limerick solicitors’ firm Holmes O’Malley Sexton, there is no conference fee, but registration is essential, and a form is available by email.The programme for the day includes two plenary sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and several parallel workshop session in both the morning and the afternoon.

Speaking in the morning plenary session on The Purpose of a Law Degree will be Professor Fiona Cownie, Keele University, Dr John Temple Lang, Cleary Gottlieb Steen Hamilton, Brussels, and Professor Paul McCutcheon, Vice President Academic, University of Limerick.

Speaking in the afternoon plenary session on Promoting Legal Research will be Professor Sally Wheeler, Queens University,Belfast, Dr Neville Cox, Trinity College Dublin, and Professor Sandeep Gopalan, NUI Maynooth.

Kudos to Sinead Eaton for putting together a really excellent package.…

Read More »

Fourth Legal Education Symposium

27 March, 2010
| 2 Comments
| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops, Legal Education

University of Limerick sundial, via UL siteThe Fourth Legal Education Symposium will be hosted by the School of Law, University of Limerick on Friday, 14 May 2010. Kindly sponsored by Limerick solicitors’ firm Holmes O’Malley Sexton, it promises to be a fascinating event.

The themes for the plenary sessions are the Purpose of a Law Degree and Promoting Legal Research; and confirmed speakers include Professor Sally Wheeler of Queens University Belfast (outgoing Chair of the Socio-Legal Studies Association) and Professor Fiona Cownie of Keele University (outgoing Chair of the Society of Legal Scholars).

In addition to the plenary sessions, papers are invited for workshops on the following eight topics:

  • Interdisciplinary law degrees;
  • Clinical legal education;
  • E-learning;
  • Integration of teaching and research;
  • The law teacher as mentor;
  • Law for non-law students;
  • Engaging students with the curriculum;
  • Undergraduate legal writing.

The organiser is Sinead Eaton, and she invites 300-500 word abstracts of possible presentations before Friday 2nd April.…

Read More »

Is a low mark a breach of contract?

22 November, 200917 September, 2020
| 3 Comments
| Academic judgment, Contract, Grading and Marking, Legal Education, Litigation, Universities

NYU Law plaqueFor a low grade to be a breach of contract, there must first be a contract, and courts are slow to find the existence of such a contract, in part because they are reluctant to get involved in grading disputes. Thus, for example, in Keefe v New York Law School (17 November 2009) (hat tips: ContractsProf Blog | Adjunct Law Prof Blog; update: 25 Misc 3d 1228(A) (2009) aff’d 71 AD3d 569 (2010)) York J held that general statements of policy in a school’s bulletins, circulars, catalogues, handbooks and website are not sufficient to create a contract between a student and law school; rather, only specific promises that are material to the student’s relationship with the school can establish the existence of a contract. (Compare and contrast the decision of Murphy J in Tansey v College of Occupational Therapists Ltd [1986] IEHC 2, [1995] 2 ILRM 601 (27 August 1986)). York J provided an important policy justification for this approach:

As a general rule, judicial review of grading disputes would inappropriately involve the courts in the very core of academic and educational decision making. Moreover, to so involve the courts in assessing the propriety of particular grades would promote litigation by countless unsuccessful students and thus undermine the credibility of the academic determinations of educational institutions.

…

Read More »

More practice needed in legal education

21 October, 200927 October, 2009
| 1 Comment
| law school, Legal Education

Larry Donnelly, NUI Galway, via their websiteThe title of this post comes from the headline in an interesting and provocative article by Larry Donnelly of NUI Galway (pictured left) in Monday’s Irish Times. His core argument is that the preparation of students for law practice should play a greater role in legal education in Ireland:

Historically, law study at third-level institutions in Ireland and in other common law jurisdictions was theory-based and took place exclusively in lecture halls. Law, however, is both an academic and a vocational discipline. Accordingly, law schools in every other common law jurisdiction have embraced the role of practice in legal education, but Irish law schools still lag far behind.

I entirely agree. Clinical and experiential learning centers on providing students with hands-on opportunities to understand how the law works in the real world. Along with the legal skills traditionally taught by law schools (legal research, legal analysis, and sometimes the ability to engage with policy and theoretical literature), the modern law degree should also seek to inculcate written and oral communication skills, interview skills, team-work, legal drafting, negotiation, advocacy, case management and practice management. 2007 saw the foundation of two very exciting Law Schools committed to this appraoch. The School of Law in the University of York began life with a bang, offering a completely progressive, clinical and experiential undergraduate curriculum, with problem-based learning modules centred on what they call the student law firm.…

Read More »

100 years of Legal Scholars

7 September, 200910 September, 2009
| No Comments
| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops, Legal Education

SLS logo, via the SLS site.And so to the University of Keele, for the centenary conference of the Society of Legal Scholars in the United Kingdom and Ireland (SLS). The SLS is a leading learned society for those who teach law in a university or similar institution or who are otherwise engaged in legal scholarship, and many of the events at this year’s conference are centred around the celebration of its centenary. Over four days this week, there are several plenary sessions and nearly 30 subject sessions with several papers each, so I won’t be live-blogging the whole thing, but I hope over the next few posts to give a flavour of some of the papers and presentations I attend. It’s usually a great conference, and I hope that it’s not hubris to hope that the SLS is around for the next 100 years as well.

Cover of Update (10 September 2009): the centenary was a theme in many of the set-piece presentations at the conference. Two in particular stand out. First, on Tuesday 8 September, Prof David Sugarman reflected on key moments in legal scholarship and education in the UK in the last 100 years – what struck me was just how much like 1950s UK law schools Irish law schools currently are.…

Read More »

Ranking law journals

24 April, 20095 May, 2009
| 2 Comments
| Legal Education, Legal Journals and Law Reviews

ARC logo, via their site.The Australian Research Council has recently completed its consultation process to develop ranking tables for journals. Controversy led to the Humanities and Creative Arts list being unavailable for a time after publication, but it seems to be available now. The ranking is in four divisions: A*, A, B and C (and there is a nice explanation here). However unfortunate such a development may be, given the way in which university life is developing internationally, it is inevitable that such tables will be developed and will have an impact.

The law journals have been extracted from the humanities list by the ever-industrious Simon Fodden on Slaw. …

Read More »

Posts pagination

Previous 1 2 3 … 5 Next

Welcome

Me in a hat

Hi there! Thanks for dropping by. I’m Eoin O’Dell, and this is my blog: Cearta.ie – the Irish for rights.


“Cearta” really is the Irish word for rights, so the title provides a good sense of the scope of this blog.

In general, I write here about private law, free speech, and cyber law; and, in particular, I write about Irish law and education policy.


Academic links
Academia.edu
ORCID
SSRN
TARA

Subscribe

  • RSS Feed
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn

Recent posts

  • A trillion here, a quadrillion there …
  • A New Look at vouchers in liquidations
  • Defamation reform – one step backward, one step forward, and a mis-step
  • As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted … the Defamation (Amendment) Bill, 2024 has been restored to the Order Paper
  • Defamation in the Programme for Government – Updates
  • Properly distributing the burden of a debt, and the actual and presumed intentions of the parties: non-theories, theories and meta-theories of subrogation
  • Open Justice and the GDPR: GDPRubbish, the Courts Service, and the Defence Forces

Archives by month

Categories by topic

Licence

Creative Commons License

This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. I am happy for you to reuse and adapt my content, provided that you attribute it to me, and do not use it commercially. Thanks. Eoin

Credit where it’s due

Some of those whose technical advice and help have proven invaluable in keeping this show on the road include Dermot Frost, Karlin Lillington, Daithí Mac Síthigh, and
Antoin Ó Lachtnáin. I’m grateful to them; please don’t blame them :)

Thanks to Blacknight for hosting.

Feeds and Admin

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

© cearta.ie 2025. Powered by WordPress