Following the first symposium in Trinity College Dublin and the second in University College Cork, third Legal Research Symposium is ongoing today, hosted by University College Dublin’s School of Law in the Quinn School of Business (pictured left). The theme for this year’s symposium is Legal Education in Context and In Practice. Organised this year by Prof Blanaid Clarke and Dr Marie-Luce Paris-Dobozy, this year’s symposium is sponsored by UCD’s Law School, whose generosity is all the greater in these more straitened financial climes.

Irish legal education faces many challenges, some shared with the rest of the university sector (the impending re-introduction of fees, government policy favouring ever greater co-operation (integration?) by universities especially at the graduate level, all in a difficult financial climate), some specific to Law Schools (the peculiar problems faced by academic law schools faced with professional obligations, whilst seeking to facilitate international research in a small jurisdiction). This symposium is a significant annual contribution to these important ongoing debates.

The Third Annual Legal Education Symposium will be hosted by UCD School of Law in the Quinn School of Business, UCD (pictured left) from 9:30am on Friday 13 March 2009 (the two previous symposia have been blogged here and here).

The morning plenary session, on Teaching Experiences in Legal Education, will be chaired by UCD School of Law’s new Dean, Prof John Jackson, and the speakers will be Prof Avrom Sherr (Institute of Advanced Legal Studies), Dr Marie-Luce Paris-Dobozy (University College Dublin) and Ms Raphael King (McCann Fitzgerald).

The afternoon plenary session, on International and European Perspectives in Legal Education, will be chaired by Prof Blanaid Clarke (University College Dublin), and the speakers will be Dr Attracta Halpin (Registrar, National University of Ireland) and Prof Frans Vanistendael (Katholieje Universiteit Leuven).

Between the plenary sessions, there will be parallel sessions on Experiential Learning, Assessment Techniques & Feedback, Clinical Legal Education, Teaching Foreign Legal Systems and (the one I’m most looking forward to) Blogs, Podcasts, Social Networks, Wikis and other social media.

Kudos to Prof Blanaid Clarke and Dr Marie-Luce Paris-Dobozy for all their hard work in putting this exciting programme together. There is no conference fee, but you must make a booking to reserve a place. So, if you’re interested, please send an email for the booking form.

It seems that sales of paper law reviews and journals are declining. For example, the Harvard Law Review had 8,760 subscribers for its 1979/1980 volume, but only 2,610 for its 2007/2008 volume. Now, via Volokh and Ambrogi, I learn of the appearance of the Journal of Legal Analysis, published by Harvard University Press.

It is a welcome departure in many directions. It is faculty edited, rather than student-edited; the latter is the norm in the US, but is regarded with some skepticism in the outside world. It is peer reviewed, with judgments being made on the quality of a piece not by the student editors but by experts in the relevant fields. It requires exclusive submission, which is the norm outside the US, but very different to the games in which authors and student-editors currently indulge to barter better placements. It is a general journal, publishing articles from all disciplinary perspectives and in all styles, rather than being confined to a specific legal field or theoretical approach. And, in an excellent development which will surely come to be seen as a some kind of apostasy, it has eschewed the Bluebook for a very minimalist house-style. Finally, it is open, free, digital: the articles will be published on a bespoke open-source platform and made fully available under a Creative Commons licence [specifically Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported] as soon as they are ready for publication. Read the rest of this entry »

Are you a Law student, undergraduate or postgraduate? Would you like to present a short paper or give a presentation on a legal topic of your choice at a colloquium at TCD on Saturday 4 April 2009?

Individual presentations will last 10-15 minutes. Prospective participants may consider presenting a paper on a topic in which they are personally interested or have conducted research for an essay or article. Whatever the topic, and reflecting the title Rethinking Law, proposals should challenge existing law or current understandings of law. For further information, including how to submit an abstract, visit the website or send an email to the organisers as soon as possible.

This is a wonderful idea. I love the fact that it is entirely general, soliciting contributions on all aspects of the law. Moreover, whilst there are now are now lots of outlets for postgraduates, this colloquium – uniquely, and excitingly – also solicits submissions from undergraduates. Indeed, it actively welcomes their (your) participation on the day, whether by presenting papers or as members of the audience. So, what are you waiting for? Send that email now!

Update: the deadline for submission of abstracts has been extended to 5:00pm on 16 February 2009, so send that email now!

In the Law School in Trinity, the proportion of my students using laptops in class has increased year by year, though they have not yet reached the levels attained in US law schools, where the vast majority of students have laptops in class. Whether this is too much of a good thing, however, is now a serious matter for debate: are benefits of the technology outweighed by the capacity for distraction (taking notes vs updating facebook)? The University of Chicago School of Law has turned off wireless internet access in class, Harvard Law School has considered banning laptops in class, various individual law professors have actually done so or negotiated them away, and there is even a law review article on the issue. Now, Law School Innovation reports on an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, headlined “Survey Gets Law-School Students’ Thoughts on Laptops, Writing, and Ethics” (sub req’d). Some extracts:

Law-school professors are fed up with students using laptop computers in class to surf to Facebook, eBay, everything but LexisNexis. And some have even banned the distracting machines. But results from a new survey show that an outright ban might not be such a good idea.

The 2008 Law School Survey of Student Engagement, released today, suggests that, when used wisely, laptops can actually enhance student engagement. The survey found that class-related laptop use correlates highly with reported gains in several areas, including critical and analytical thinking.

Students who used laptops for class-related activities, like reading case briefs or taking notes, were more likely than students using laptops during class for other purposes to be engaged in classroom discussions, synthesize concepts from different courses, and work hard to meet faculty expectations, the survey found …

I broadly agree with these findings. I’ve been on both sides of these laptops, and I’m going to break ranks and admit something to those students reading this blog: from the front of the class, I can often tell when someone is concentrating on the screen for reasons other than the class. For example, it’s pretty obvious if you’re furiously typing away while everyone else is doing nothing at all, studiously failing to answer a question I’ve just posed – gotcha! you’re drafting an email or updating a profile, aren’t you? Now, this is an extreme example, but there are lots of obvious examples short of that, and even if I don’t notice every non-classroom related usage, I do notice a lot of them. And in my class, you run the risk of having a few questions directed specifically to you just when you’re deepest into your online distraction. But I don’t see myself going any further and seeking to turn off the wifi or even ban the laptops. I think that the benefits of technology far, far outweigh the detriments. And, in any event, people who are bored in class will daydream even if they don’t surf.

Two – relatively recent – posts on Concurring Opinions caught my eye. They both deal with student survey evaluations of lecturers’ teaching skills.

In the first, Sarah Lawsky asks some important questions:

about teaching evaluations: how they are best structured and analyzed, disseminated, and used to make decisions, and, in the larger scheme, how differing interests should be weighed as we address these issues.

And in the comments, she receives some excellent advice (”the overriding principle is to have a clear understanding of who the intended audience for an instrument is”) and links to further resources on the topic.

In the second, Dave Hoffmann points to another paper on the issue, and concludes from it that

well-regarded, young, inexperienced teachers provide better short-term results (hypothesis: enthusiasm), but over the longer term unpopular, older, experienced teachers add the most value.

Query: in an attempt to give students the best of both worlds, can teachers and lecturers not be both enthusiastic and experienced?

Surprisingly, according to Wordpress Blog Stats, the most popular page on this blog yesterday was The Future of Irish Legal Education, about the second annual Legal Education Symposium hosted by UCC’s Faculty of Law and sponsored by Dillon Eustace Solicitors. Now, either this blog really does have a serious reader or two, or I need another stats package. Even if the latter is more likely, just in case the former is true, here are two more developments (heading, inevitably, in opposite directions) for the Legal Education junkie(s) out there.

First, Stephen Griffin of Tulane, writing on Balkinization under the heading The Carnegie Report: Can Legal Education Be Reformed? discussed subjecting the Carneige Foundation’s report on Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (which I have discussed here and here on this blog – the second post discusses the recent Future of Legal Education Conference | excellent blog analysis here | papers here) to detailed analysis and finding it wanting. Read the rest of this entry »

There has been much debate of late over on Law School Innovation arising out of the American Association of Law Schools‘ recent annual conference on the theme of Reassessing our Role as Scholars and Educators in Light of Change. The LSI debate has been focussed in particular on the Plenary Session on Rethinking Legal Education for the 21st Century (see eg, here (including mp3 of the session) and here), which covered similar issues to those raised in my recent post Legal Education, again. To take one example, there was an interesting discussion of the Carneige Foundation’s report on Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (which I have discussed on this blog). Again Douglas Berman has proposed a hierarchy of goals for law school instruction and serving students:

Law school instruction and serving students should be focused on…

5. helping students pass the bar

4. helping students get better grades

3. helping students learn doctrines and skills needed to be competent lawyers

2. helping students develop insights and abilities needed to be outstanding lawyers

1. helping students enhance talents and options needed to be flourishing professionals.

I’m not convinced that this list would apply without modification in a non-US law school. In the US, students do an undergraduate degree (in arts or science), then study law in graduate school, and finally take a summer crammer course to sit the bar exam(s) of the state(s) in which they wish to practice. In that schedule, many of the broad benefits of a university education can and will be supplied by the initial undergraduate degree, and it is right that a law school should focus on the less intangible and more instrumental goals of helping students to become lawyers. On the other hand, outside the US, students typically study law as an undergraduate subject, and then go to do a further, professional, course to qualify for practice. In this schedule, the university law school must not lose sight of the fact that their degrees will be their students’ source for the general if more intangible benefits of a third level education, and that many of the instrumental goals of legal education will – or at least ought to be – provided in the subsequent professional course. This is not to say that there is no room for practical matters in a university law school (or, for that matter, pace Bruce Boyden on Concurring Opinions, for academic matters on a professional course); I have argued in a recent post that the university needs to have room for both approaches. My point is merely that I would be slow to subscribe to a hierarchy like Douglas’s which seems to me to be too focussed on the instrumental benefits of Law School and insufficiently directed to the general educational benefits of university education. Of course, this in turn raises the question of what a similar heirachy in a non-US – or at least, Irish – law school might look like. I will think on this and return to the issue at a later date, but I leave it now as an exercise for you, gentle reader(s), likewise to think, and perhaps to make suggestions in the comments below.