The Law School—Global Issues, Local Questions edited by Fiona Cownie (original) (raw)
Related papers
History is Past Politics: A Critique of the Legal Skills Movement in England and Wales
Journal of Law and Society, 1998
In the past thirty years legal practice changed so significantly that a fundamental response was demanded of legal education. Making legal skills a compulsory component in the vocational stage was an incomplete response. It addressed the technical competence of lawyers but left significant gaps in professional preparation in terms of content and methodology. By focusing on the educational and pedagogic implications of the skills curriculum the clinical movement contributed to these gaps. The Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct has facilitated the consideration of a curriculum organized around a more imaginative integration of legal skills in order to begin to tackle these failings and prepare lawyers for the new economic and social challenges facing them. Solutions, however, must permeate every stage of legal education, requiring unprecedented levels of co-operation and interaction between the profession and the academy.
The Politics of Legal Education
upcoming in ‘The Politics of European Legal Research: Behind the Method' Edgar Elgar (2022)
The chapter unpacks the politics of nexus between legal education, legal practice and legal research and proposes some cornerstones for a more reflexive and forward-looking re-articulation. We start by problematising some common assumptions and subsequently lay out contemporary challenges to legal education and academia. We argue that we need to abandon all reflexes associating national=doctrinal=useful for legal practice and hence legal education, and international=non-doctrinal=useless for lawyers and hence legal education. First, legal education has to be conscious of the complexity of inter-connected, and ever-changing, laws, regulations and governance structures in the contemporary world. Second, it needs to be built on pluralist research agendas, that draw on doctrinal and non-doctrinal scholarship, with both national and global perspectives in mind. Finally, legal education for the 21st century has to be accountable to a broader set of actors than it has been the case thus far: it needs a more inclusive concept of ‘legal practice’.
This article considers the institutional dimensions of professionalism and the legal profession's struggle with the challenges of post-modernity. An aspect of this is the Law Society's Training Framework Review (TFR) which promises changes to solicitors' education from 'cradle to grave'. The first part of the article analyses the structure and drivers of the TFR, their origins, and how they will be articulated. Secondly, the TFR is considered in the context of the political economy of higher education and its role in the new capitalism. Finally, we examine the potential effects of the TFR for the legal profession in the context of increasing practice segmentation and the threat of deprofessionalization, and also for the Law Society itself, whether it can retain a key role in the life course of the legal profession.
In Search of the Law Beyond Neoliberalism: A Critical Challenge for Legal Education
What is the overall mission and philosophy of legal education in these times that have been characterized by a paradigmatic shift? Is there a place for radical innovation and critical theory in the midst of the increasing centrality of market values, under the prevailing Neoliberal order and its insistence on recreating our universities and law schools in its image and likeness?
Drexel Law Review , 2013
A powerful assemblage of forces seems to be ensuring that the transna-tional colonizes the hearts and ambitions of emerging cadres of law graduates. Over the last twenty-five years, the legal academy has been shifting alongside, and in reaction to, the movement of people, capital, and goods across borders and the legal regimes that enable and regulate such movement. Thus, the structure and curricula of law schools are being revised in navigating a dizzyingly polycentric world. Yet the current trajectory seems fraught with tensions. On the one hand, the accent is on diversity; on the other, the cumulative effect seems to engender convergence and empower standardization. On the one hand, the reforms have been aimed at revitalizing legal education; on the other, educational goals seem to be downsized to the needs of legal practice. On the one hand, the focus is on responding to social needs; on the other, there seems to be a heightened disconnect from the need of marginalized populations. This Article maps the current debate on globalizing legal education, highlights its stakes, and explores how we may change the terms of the debate. It urges that a core challenge and promise of globalized legal education is to foster critical experimentation and intellectual heterodoxy so that we are better able to problematize received professional conceits and productively disorient our conceptual frontiers. To address this challenge and realize this promise, we will be aided by further research on the relationship between the current trajectory of the globalization of legal education and the structures of global governance-research that studies the political economy of current trends and maps the legal consciousness that accompanies it in order to better