Affect And Legal Education

This text, the first full-length book study of the subject, seeks to make emotion a central topic of research for legal educators, and restore the power of emotion in our teaching and learning. Interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in its reference, it breaks new ground in its analysis of the educational lifeworld of situations, communities, actors and interactions in legal education.

The place of emotion in legal education is rarely discussed or analysed, and we do not have to seek far for the reasons. The difficulty of interdisciplinary research, the technicisation of legal education itself, the view that affect is irrational and antithetical to core western ideals of rationality - all this has made the subject of emotion in legal education invisible. Yet the educational literature on emotion proves how essential it is to student learning and to the professional lives of teachers. This text, the first full-length book study of the subject, seeks to make emotion a central topic of research for legal educators, and restore the power of emotion in our teaching and learning. Part 1 focuses on the contribution that neuroscience can make to legal learning, a theme that is carried through other chapters in the book. Part 2 explores the role of emotion in the working lives of academics and clinical staff, while Part 3 analyses the ways in which emotion can be used in learning and teaching. The book, interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in its reference, breaks new ground in its analysis of the educational lifeworld of situations, communities, actors and interactions in legal education.

There is a myth that lingers around legal education in many democracies. That myth would have us believe that law students are admitted and then succeed based on raw merit, and that law schools are neutral settings in which professors (also selected and promoted based on merit) use their expertise to train those students to become lawyers. Based on original, empirical research, this book investigates this myth from myriad perspectives, diverse settings, and in different nations, revealing that hierarchies of power and cultural norms shape and maintain inequities in legal education. Embedded within law school cultures are assumptions that also stymie efforts at reform. The book examines hidden pedagogical messages, showing how presumptions about theory’s relation to practice are refracted through the obfuscating lens of curricula. The contributors also tackle questions of class and market as they affect law training. Finally, this collection examines how structural barriers replicate injustice even within institutions representing themselves as democratic and open, revealing common dynamics across cultural and institutional forms. The chapters speak to similar issues and to one another about the influence of context, images of law and lawyers, the political economy of legal education, and the agency of students and faculty.

Building on Best Practices is a follow-up to Best Practices for Legal Education, a project of the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA), authored primarily by Roy Stuckey. With contributions from more than 50 legal educators, this new volume is not a second edition, but is intended to be used in conjunction with the original volume, as the core content of Best Practices remains just as useful as when it was originally published. In the wake of new ABA Accreditation Standards, the MacCrate Report, and other changes, legal education is called upon today to respond to a broader view of what lawyers must be trained to do. Building on Best Practices identifies ten such areas and provides guidance on what and how to teach them. The demand to teach a broader range of knowledge, skills, and values presents difficult trade-offs, however, that are also considered. "To demonstrate that law schools can still add value to careers and society, legal educators must grapple with structural changes that affect every aspect of teaching, learning and researching. Building on Best Practices provides diverse expertise and useful guidance on approaching these challenges and on improving and expanding the enterprise of legal education." - Jeffrey R. Baker, Journal of Legal Education

How we interpret and understand the historical contexts of legal education has profoundly affected how we understand contemporary educational cultures and practices. This book, the result of a Modern Law Review seminar, both celebrates and critiques the lasting impact of Peter Birks’ influential edited collection, Pressing Problems in the Law: Volume 2: What is the Law School for? Published in 1996, his book addresses many critical issues that are hauntingly present in the 21st century, amongst them the impact of globalisation; technological disruption; and the tension inherent in law schools as they seek to balance the competing interest of teaching, research and administration. Yet Birks’ collection misses key issues, too. The role of wellbeing, of emotion or affect, the relation of legal education to education, the status of legal education in what, since his volume, have become the devolved jurisdictions of Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland – these and others are absent from the research agenda of the book. Today, legal educators face new challenges. We are still recovering from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on our universities. In 1996 Birks was keen to stress the importance of comparative research within Europe. Today, legal researchers are dismayed at the possibility of losing valuable EU research funding when the UK leaves the EU, and at the many other negative effects of Brexit on legal education. The proposed Solicitors Qualifying Examination takes legal education regulation and professional learning into uncharted waters. This book discusses these and related impacts on our legal educations. As law schools approach an existential crossroads post-Covid-19, it seems timely to revisit Birks’ fundamental question: what are law schools for?

A critical history of the Americanization of legal education in fourteen countries The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the export of American power—both hard and soft—throughout the world. What role did US cultural and economic imperialism play in legal education? American Legal Education Abroad offers an unprecedented and surprising picture of the history of legal education in fourteen countries beyond the United States. Each study in this book represents a critical history of the Americanization of legal education, reexamining prevailing narratives of exportation, transplantation, and imperialism. Collectively, these studies challenge the conventional wisdom that American ideas and practices have dominated globally. Editors Susan Bartie and David Sandomierski and their contributors suggest that to understand legal education and to respond thoughtfully to the mounting present-day challenges, it is essential to look beyond a particular region and consider not only the ideas behind legal education but also the broader historical, political, and cultural factors that have shaped them. American Legal Education Abroad begins with an important foundational history by leading Harvard Law School historian Bruce Kimball, who explains the factors that created a transportable American legal model, and the book concludes with reflections from two prominent American law professors, Susan Carle and Bob Gordon, whose observations on recent disruptions within US law schools suggest that their influence within the global order of legal education may soon fall into further decline. This book should be considered an invaluable resource for anyone in the field of law.

For several years legal professions across the world have, to varying degrees, been undergoing dramatic changes as a result of a range of forces such as globalization, diversification and changes in regulation. In many jurisdictions the extent of these transformations have led to a process of professional fragmentation and generated uncertainty at institutional, organisational and individual levels about the nature and future of legal professionalism. As a result legal education is in flux in many of jurisdictions including the United States, the UK and Australia, with further effects in other Common Law and some Civil law countries. The situation in the UK exemplifies the sense of uncertainty and crisis, with a growing number of pathways into law; an increasing surplus of law graduates to graduate entry positions and most recently proposals for reform of legal education and training by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA). This collection addresses both current and historical approaches showing that some problems which appear to be modern are endemic, that there are still some important prospects for change and that policy issues may be more important than the interests of lawyers and educators. This makes this volume a source of interest to lawyers, law students, academic and policy makers as well as the discerning public. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the Legal Profession.

"This edited book addresses contemporary challenges in Clinical Legal Education (CLE), considering its role in legal education and in the broader community that it serves. Written by experts from various international contexts, the book explores how the changing nature and requirements of legal practice alongside social and technological developments affect the pedagogy of Clinical Legal Education. Chapters chart the development of Clinical Legal Education across various jurisdictions and examine developments in program design and supervision of and in CLE along with the role of CLE in the community. The authors also reflect on the dynamic and developing role of Clinical Legal Education and offer recommendations for the future. This book will be essential reading for academics, researchers in clinical legal education and those interested in legal education across the world. It will also be of interest to students of clinical legal education whose research requires a deeper understanding of the current themes and issues of the subject"--