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.

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.

Eagle -eyed readers may have noticed the recent addition of a law news feed on the top of the right side bar; it’s called Paper Chase, and it provides Jurist headlines updated every 15 minutes or so. I presume it gets its name from the novel (1970, reissued 2004), movie (1973) and television series (1978-1978, 1983-1986) of that name. I was reminded of this wonderful cultural insight into elite US law schools by a post by David Papke on the Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog:

The Paper Chase: What Does the Film Tell Us About Contemporary Legal Education?

I recently screened The Paper Chase (1973) in one of my law school classes. While the majority of current law students are more familiar with recent pop cultural portrayals of legal education such as Legally Blonde (2001) [imdb], The Paper Chase seems to me to set the stage for those portrayals, especially through the character of Professor Kingsfield [wikipedia] and the images from his menacing Socratic classes. I interpret The Paper Chase as the fictional story of a law student encountering and then overcoming the dehumanizing forces of legal education.

My students resisted this interpretation and proffered two other readings. Some thought The Paper Chase should be recognized as a largely accurate portrayal of the realities of legal education. … Other students interpreted The Paper Chase as a positive portrayal of legal education, as a suggestion that law school could and should toughen students and separate those who “had it” from the mere posers. One student said she regretted her legal education was not more like the one portrayed in The Paper Chase. …

Read the rest of this entry »

A little late, from Law is Cool, with added links, an extract from a recent speech by Prof Harry Arthurs (pictured) which is as relevant to graduates on this side of the pond as it is in Canada:

Success Should not come at Expense of Social Justice

By: Law is Cool Contributor · August 22, 2008 · Filed Under Law Career, Pro Bono ·  

York University President Emeritus Harry Arthurs told graduands at Spring Convocation ceremonies last [June] …,

…if you have abilities, if you have resources and opportunities, you also have an obligation to use them on behalf of people who don’t.

Arthurs, a renowned labour law scholar, graduated with his law degree from the University of Toronto in 1958.

A video of his speech is available here.

There is more on the speech, with photos and background, here. Read the rest of this entry »