bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Inevitability and Use
Authors: Cooper Graeme
Published: June 2021

There are two standard jokes about economists. The punch line to the first joke is, “assume a can opener,” and the punch line to the second is “the light is better over here.” In these comments I am going to ask you to assume can openers, lots of can openers, and very large can openers. These remarks will not address the merits of the economic analysis of law as a critical study. My focus will not be on the usual criticisms of economic analysis and economics generally: the problems of methodology, the unrealistic assumptions made or the incompleteness of modelling techniques. I leave for another day the debate whether economic analysis will ultimately be found to be a fruitful field of study or whether it will prove to be barren. Instead, these comments proceed on the assumption that economic analysis deserves some place in the law school curriculum simply because it is so prevalent and pervasive. Its currency and its prevalence entitles it to a place in the curriculum just as much as feminist theory or critical legal theory. Let us assume, therefore, that law and economics will be taught in law schools if for no better reason than as an example of the heresy of the age. Having chosen for myself a much simpler task than addressing the methodology of law and economics, I want to address two pedagogical issues which flow from the paper, 1 and to tie us back into the theme of the Conference, Theory in Legal Education. These remarks explore the values latent in the theory and elaborate some of the material spoken about earlier. 2 My basic question is simple to ask, is teaching economic analysis simply the indoctrination of an implicit conservative ideology?
Feminism in Legal Education
Authors: MacKinnon Catharine
Published: June 2021

Recently I was in an elevator with a member of a U.S. Court of Appeals — an enlightened, intelligent, sincere and very nice man — who congratulated me on the publication of my recent book, Feminism Unmodified. As I thanked him, he pondered the floor reflectively and said, “amazing how much you can accomplish if you just stay focused on one thing.” A few floors went by before I replied that, yes, the whole law library testified to that, and one ought to be able to accomplish at least as much by focusing on the other 53 per cent of the population.Feminism is not a monotonic, uni-dimensional, geographically bounded map of a sector of society, albeit a huge and neglected one. It is not a new partiality claiming universality. It is a multi-faceted approach to society as a whole, an engaged discipline of a diverse reality with both empirical and analytic dimensions, explanatory as well as descriptive aspirations, and practical as well as theoretical ambitions. Because it must consider not only existing law and reality, but women’s exclusion from life and scholarship, and because nothing that happens to a woman or a man is presumed exogenous to it, feminism is perhaps less about “one thing” than any other approach to legal scholarship.
Self and Peer Assessment in Legal Education
Authors: Rawson Shirley , Tyree Alan L
Published: June 2021

The vast majority of law schools in the western world have the privilege of admitting hard working, creative and intelligent students, no matter how the slippery concept of “intelligence” is measured. Yet every year in almost every course, there are students whose work is assigned low grades because it lacks substance, clarity, creativity and sophistication. Why is such poor quality work produced?
The Growth of Legal Education in Australian Secondary Schools: Implications for Tertiary and Secondary Legal Education
Authors: Brun Marlene Le , Clark Eugene E
Published: June 2021

The success and popularity of various law-related education programs in secondary schools is evident again in the recent formal introduction of legal studies into the school systems in Queensland and New South Wales. Law-related education is not a new idea in Australia, however. In some Australian states, particularly Victoria and Tasmania, legal studies programs have grown and apparently flourished. In this article we argue that it is time for a review of law-related education. Such a review is especially useful to school systems, such as those in Queensland, embarking on a program of law-related education and provides a foundation for the further development of existing school programs. Moreover, much can be learned by tertiary educators from an examination of the legal studies programs in various states: it can be used to establish and strengthen the links between tertiary and secondary levels of legal education and build upon the foundation of legal knowledge acquired by students in schools prior to their entry to the study of law at universities and colleges. In addition, as educators in tertiary institutions we should be aware and begin to consider how the completion of law-related courses before higher education admission may affect the curriculum taught and pedagogical approaches adopted in first year law study at tertiary level.

In this article we briefly address the development of law-related education in secondary schools. We discuss the rationale behind the development of legal studies courses and focus on the program in Tasmania, one of the first states to institute legal studies at matriculation level. We also draw upon our own experiencesl in teaching introductory courses in law at both tertiary and secondary levels and reflect on our research and committee work with curricula for Legal Studies and for Introduction to Law, offered to prospective law students at the University of Tasmania. In addition we outline the approaches adopted, the materials developed and our thoughts on ways to facilitate cooperation between tertiary and secondary levels of legal education.
Competition, Cooperation and Legal Change, service ideal, competition, corporatisation, legal services, Australian Legal Academy
Authors: Weisbrot David
Published: June 2021

There are a number of trends in the development of the contemporary Australian legal profession which have been widely remarked upon, among them:

the growth in size of the profession;

the increasingly boundary-free nature of legal practice;

the imperatives for private legal practice to become more competitive and “business-like”;

the deprofessionalisation of certain formerly lucrative areas of legal practice, such as residential conveyancing;

the crisis in legal education caused by the very poor level of resources available to the university law schools;

the inaccessibility of the courts for reasons of cost and delay, and

the consequent growth of Alternative (or preferably “Additional”) Dispute Resolution (ADR).

The inter-relationship between these phenomena, however, has been much less often explored. In this article I have attempted to do this, with some trepidation, focussing particularly on the ways in which legal change1 may be promoted through the development of a more cooperative relationship between academic lawyers and the private legal profession.
Field Placement (Externship) - A Valuable Application of Clinical Education?
Authors: Coss Graeme
Published: June 2021

[Extract] The three primary models of clinical legal education can be readily distinguished.

In-house programs involve live-client contact as well as supervision by a full-time member of Faculty; the same program may also be situated off-campus.

Simulation programs are free of live-client case work.

Field placements (or externships) may have live-client work, but primary responsibility for supervision rests with persons other than full-time Faculty.

Externships permit more students the opportunity of having clinical experiences than do in-house clinics, where costs and the very nature of the educational experience place severe limitations on the numbers of students permitted to enroll. Externships have thus been hailed as the one form of clinical experience potentially available to all students.

Their detractors however, are legion: “If there is a conventional wisdom about [externships], it is that schools that are serious about clinical education should not operate such programs. Although in-house programs are invariably criticised for their high establishment and running costs, and simulation programs are viewed as “inferior” because of their want of intense dynamic exposure, externships are cursorily dismissed for the perceived dearth of a worthwhile educational experience. Lack of planning, lack of Faculty involvement and lack of adequate supervision are focussed on as the primary shortcomings of these “farm-out” programs, as they are derisively labeled. As has been recognised by more than one commentator:

One danger of out-of-house placements is that our students may be exposed to poor lawyering, that this behaviour might serve as a model for them, and that they might come away from the experience with serious misconceptions about their professional roles and work. To give credit for such an experience would be ludicrous.
Instructional Design and Student Learning in Professional Legal Education
Authors: Macfarlane Julie , Boyle Pat
Published: June 2021

The study which is described in this paper was designed with two complementary objectives in mind. The first objective was to carry out research to discover more about student conceptions of their learning in an educational program which would introduce a new approach to learning and challenge their expectations. The researchers — an instructional evaluation specialist and a law teacher — were particularly concerned in the first stage to explore as wide a range of student conceptions and reactions to the learning process as possible and then to attempt to draw some general observations from those results. A phenomenographic1 approach was used to leave open the possibility of discovering unintended and unexpected outcomes. The phenomenographic approach focuses on “mapping the qualitatively different ways in which people experience, conceptualise, perceive and understand various aspects of and phenomena in the world around them.” To this end, the researchers sought from student respondents as wide a range as possible of personal responses and reactions to their learning experiences and environment.

The second objective of the study was to consider the question whether or not the design principles of the new program achieved their intended outcomes. These design principles and their anticipated implications for student learning described in detail below. The second objective of the project was therefore to provide information for decision-makers3 with which to evaluate the success of the new program in achieving its stated goals (including intended processes) and on which to ground program revisions and modifications for the second year of operation. These two drivers for the study provided a dual motivation to explore the impact of this new program on a sample of its first year student entrants. In order to ensure that the research results from the project could be meaningful and usefully translated into evaluative judgements about the success of the program in meeting its goals, three working hypotheses were formulated which were used to guide the data-gathering phase of the project; that is, face-to-face interviews conducted with the students. The three working hypotheses were derived from the design principles of the new program and knowledge of the students’ previous educational experiences and approaches to learning. The design principles of the program and the working hypotheses themselves are discussed in detail below.

The empirical stage of the study took the form of a set of one-on-one interviews with a sample group of students from the new program, just three months into the program. The methodology used for these interviews, the working hypotheses which guided them and an analysis of the data derived follow below.
Improving the Quality of Learning in Law Schools by Improving Student Assessment
Authors: Rogers Nicolette
Published: June 2021

Internationally and nationally there is an exciting wave of renewed interest in improving the quality of higher education. In the context of legal education, law schools across Australia are engaged (or soon will be given the new push towards academic “accountability”), in the sometimes painful process of examining and evaluating the effectiveness of their teaching.

Whilst it is essential when considering how to encourage students to adopt qualitative learning approaches to consider the effect of all elements in the learning “eco-system” on the student, it is my thesis that student assessment plays not only an important, but a critical role in influencing their approaches to learning tasks.

I am encouraged by the similar sentiments expressed by such pre-eminent writers as Paul Ramsden, William Twining and Professor Kahn-Freund. Indeed, it is a tragic indictment on the legal education system generally that it is now a quarter of a century since Professor Kahn-Freund pleaded that “… difficulties or none, a start must be made and the first thing to be reformed is the examination system. This reform is the most urgent job confronting the present generation of law teachers”.

In 1987, in Australia, the Pearce Committee6 reported the prevailing method of assessment used by Australian law schools as the problem-type examination at the end of the semester:

In all law schools except Macquarie and UNSW, a substantial majority of the subjects taught are assessed as to 50% or more of the possible marks by means of formal end of year or semester examinations.

In my own law school in 1992,80 per cent of the subjects offered will have examinations worth 80 per cent or more of the total possible marks available.

If the examination system was in need of “urgent reform” twenty-five years ago, this generation of legal educators risks losing complete credibility if it does not engage in a wholescale review of its assessment procedures.
The Participation of Indigenous Australians in Legal Education
Authors: Lavery Daniel
Published: June 2021

This paper is based on a survey of Australian law schools in 1990–91 which sought to investigate the interface between indigenous Australians and law studies. The survey was prompted by similar recent research conducted in Canada. The focus of this paper is the Australian data but a review of the Canadian scene will be given to show the depth of field which exists. The Australian survey results will be first presented. A survey of the Canadian scene will follow with the interest being on the special entrance schemes available to Indian, Metis and Inuit peoples and the existence and operation of pre-law programmes in Canada. Although this paper cannot purport to be truly comparative, comparisons and contrasts will be drawn where possible. Some general conclusions will then be drawn with a particular emphasis on one aspect of the legal education of aboriginal peoples which is not present in the Australian analysis, that of an intensive nationally-based pre-law preparatory programme. It will be argued that, as a matter of priority, efforts should be directed to the establishment of such a programme in Australia.

A note of caution should also be firmly struck at the outset. This paper is from the perspective of a Euro-Australian lawyer within the dominant legal culture. This writer cannot, and does not purport to, give the indigenous perspective.
The Makings of a Good Law School?
Authors: Trebilcock Michael
Published: June 2021

Over the course of an academic career spanning about 27 years, I have seen inside many different law schools. I undertook my initial legal training at the University of Canterbury Law School in Christchurch, New Zealand, between 1959 and 1962. I entered law school out of a country high school. In my first year, there was only one full-time academic member of staff, the balance of the instruction being undertaken mostly by young or struggling practitioners who required extra income. By the end of my degree, the school had inched up to three full-time academic staff. Moreover, many of the students were part-time, with students after their first or second year simultaneously clerking with local law firms. On moving to the University of Adelaide Law School in 1963, as a tutor while simultaneously undertaking an LL M by thesis, I encountered a law school which initially had six or seven full-time members of staff, with a great deal of practitioner instruction and much part-time study by students. By the end of my time at Adelaide in 1969, the Faculty had increased to perhaps 12 or 14 full-time staff members. On moving to the McGill Law School in Montreal in 1969, I encountered my first full-blown law school, with perhaps 25 full-time members of faculty and a full-time student body and national programmes offering degrees in both common and civil law, as well as a significant full-time graduate programme. On moving to the University of Toronto Law School in 1972, I joined what was perhaps regarded as the pre-eminent academic law school in Canada, with strong and proud traditions of innovation in legal education, although at that time afflicted with a degree of parochialism and complacency that was at variance with these traditions. During the ensuing 18 years at the University of Toronto, I took a leave at the University of Chicago law school in 1976 and was exposed for the first time to a law school with a strong commitment to interdisciplinary studies, especially, in my case, law and economics. A further leave at the Yale Law School in 1985 exposed me to an even broader range of theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives on law. Both Chicago and Yale also have strong traditions of organised collegial forums for review of research work in progress. In the course of the last year, I have been associated with two law school reviews on a pending change of command: first, our own Law School and secondly the University of British Columbia Law School. And most recently, I have spent four weeks at the University of Melbourne Law School, revisited my first academic home, the University of Adelaide Law School and made brief visits to Monash and the University of Sydney law schools.
Evaluating and Improving Teaching in Higher Education
Authors: Ramsden Paul
Published: June 2021

There are three main issues to consider in any consideration of the evaluation or assessment of teaching in higher education: the nature of good teaching; its measurement; and its promotion.

It is a poignant commentary on the mood of higher education in Australia and the United Kingdom that few discussions of educational quality, accountability, and the appraisal of academic staff have engaged with these issues at other than the most superficial level. Policies have been formed and are being implemented in apparent ignorance of the accumulated educational knowledge that enables these key questions to be rationally addressed.

This article is an attempt to redress the balance by providing a perspective on evaluating and improving teaching performance which brings educational principles into the foreground. The first part deals with the characteristics of effective teaching in higher education and critically reviews the related issues of appraisal, the use of student ratings, and the measurement of teaching performance. The second part examines how we might use evaluation to improve the quality of teaching.
Recent Statistical Trends in Australian Legal Education
Authors: Weisbrot David
Published: June 2021

[Extract] Law Schools The central message of the Pearce Report on Australian Law Schools was that legal education in Australia is being run on the cheap, and this is a Bad Thing. The moral for Vice Chancellors, University Councils and Governments, however, is that legal education in Australia can be run on the cheap, and this is an Absolutely Splendid Thing.

In 1960, there were six university law schools in Australia — one in each state capital. By the mid-1970s the number had doubled, with second law schools established in Victoria and Queensland, three new law schools in New South Wales, and another established at the Australian National University in Canberra. One of the law schools in each of Queensland and New South Wales was established in an Institute of Technology, foreshadowing the end of the binary divide in higher education.

By the mid-1990s, the number of law schools will double again. New law schools have already been established, or are about to be established, at seven more public universities: Murdoch University, Wollongong University, Newcastle University, the University of the Northern Territory, Flinders University, Griffith University and James Cook University. La Trobe University’s well-known legal studies department is also set to begin offering LLB degrees for the first time, in addition to the BA in Legal Studies.

Similarly, the legal studies group within the Business and Commerce Faculty of the University of New England, in Armidale, NSW, is currently taking active steps towards the creation of a separate law school. The University also has a branch in Coffs Harbour and is one of the leaders in distance education, so that there are arguments in favour of this move despite the already crowded field. The conversion of the legal studies department into a law school at the University of Canberra is also strongly rumoured. Further, there is also likely to be pressure soon to establish a law school at the University of Western Sydney, which already houses some legal studies departments at its separate campuses and is located in a heavily populated region which is poorly served by professional faculties (and services).
An Oversupply of Law Graduates? Putting the Statistics in Context
Authors: Parker Christine
Published: June 2021

In the last 12 months there have been a spate of stories in the press warning us of an impending “glut” of lawyers. The most frequently quoted “fact” is that there are as many law students as there are lawyers. Professor Bob Williams of Monash University has warned that the growing number of law students is a “potential catastrophe”, and the Queensland Attorney-General has predicted that “we will end up in the same situation as California, where large numbers of lawyers are wandering around … looking to create work” by “ambulance chasing” or touting.

But further research into statistical trends for Australian lawyers and students indicates that the real story is more complex and less alarming than the headlines suggest. First, careful collection of statistics shows that it is simply not true that there are almost as many law students as lawyers in Australia. Secondly, the argument that there are too many law students is fundamentally flawed because it assumes that all law students become lawyers, without sufficiently defining the term “lawyers”. It also fails to take account of graduation rates, attrition from the profession and the number of graduates who do not remain in the law. Finally, reports of the student “glut” have taken an ahistorical approach to the statistics and failed to examine the past ratios of students to lawyers.

The purpose of this paper is to set out the statistics as accurately as possible for analysis and planning. Accurate statistics on law students and where they go after graduation, as well as the composition of the legal industry, are necessary in order to plan for legal education and to make judgments on the future prospects of law graduates.
Legal Studies In Secondary Schools: the New South Wales Experience
Authors: Kamvounias Patty
Published: June 2021

The extraordinary growth and popularity of legal studies in New South Wales secondary schools clearly demonstrates the interest of school students in the law and confirms that legal education is not the exclusive domain of the universities. Much of the literature on legal education focuses on tertiary legal education with very little attention being given to legal education in secondary schools.1 What exactly is being taught in the secondary school legal studies courses? How and by whom should such courses be taught? In this article, I outline the content of the legal studies courses in New South Wales and argue that the current courses and the plans for further developments are overly ambitious for several reasons, including, that the course content has not been kept to reasonable limits and that in some instances may be overly technical. As part of my argument, I discuss the assistance currently offered to legal studies teachers to illustrate the ambitious nature of the courses in New South Wales. Secondary school teachers are not lawyers, yet they are being called upon to teach “law” or more correctly, to teach “about the law”. Being “teachers” they know how to teach but now they are necessarily concentrating on what to teach.
The Legal Historian, Masochist or Missionary? A Canadian’s Reflections
Authors: McLaren John
Published: June 2021

In this article I address the question of the relevance of the teaching of and research into legal history to the broader mission of legal educators. Based on my experience in devising and teaching courses in Canadian legal history and close observation of the growth of this area of scholarship in Canada, I argue strongly that legal historical instruction and research is vital to both the intellectual and practical endeavours of law schools. I do so because of a belief that knowledge of the development of law, legal institutions and legal ideology in the context of political, social and economic forces is essential to an understanding of legal culture (especially one’s own), and that historical understanding increasingly provides the context in which lawyers are called upon to apply their intellectual talents and skills to live problems.
Legal Skills Training: Some Thoughts On Terminology and Ongoing Challenges
Authors: Wade John H
Published: June 2021

This paper aims to set out briefly the grand goals of law school education; to struggle with the perhaps esoteric definitional problem of which goals might be labelled as “skills”; and to catalogue some of the hurdles/challenges to teaching and learning of skills at law schools.
Contextualising Law: An Attempt to Operationalise Theory by Teaching Interviewing in the Law School
Authors: Leaver Alan
Published: June 2021

In the Pearce Report three major goals of law schools were identified as similar to those of universities: to undertake research; to service the community; and to teach.1 Achievement of the last goal required going beyond the mere “imparting of knowledge” to include (among other things) an understanding of the law in operation as well as in context, and to develop in students practical legal skills and competencies that were essential to all types of legal work, notwithstanding the degree of separation of that work from the practice of law.2 The recommendation was made that this objective could be achieved by teaching specific practical legal skills such as advocacy, communication, counselling, drafting, interpretation of legislation, negotiation, and research and writing.3

One inference to be drawn from the above recommendation is that the teaching of law can be improved, and the perceived separation of the theory and the practice of law narrowed to some extent, by incorporating practical legal skills into the curricula of law schools. This hypothesis, that teaching and learning of law can be optimised by creating and maintaining a substantial and realistic nexus between legal theory and legal practice,4 finds support from recent research in general educational theory and methodology of other practice-based professions.5 However, research in Australia to support that hypothesis in regard to law in the interim since the publication of the Pearce Report appears to remain limited if special issues of periodicals,6 specialist periodicals7 and projects supported by the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching8 can be relied upon as indicators of research. This alleged limitation exists notwithstanding attention being brought by the Pearce Report to the relative paucity of writing, and to the almost absolute absence of empirical data, on legal education.9

A movement towards incorporation of such a practical approach, endorsed at the time of publication of the Pearce Report by some commentators10 and subsequently supported by others,11 has occurred since the release of the Pearce Report, especially in newly established law schools which have been innovative to varying degrees,12 thanks in part to support from the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching. This paper describes one such innovation in legal education, the teaching of interviewing skills as an addition to the mooting component of the criminal law course, adopted at the Law School of the Flinders University of South Australia and supported by a grant from the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching during 1994. The mooting framework of the criminal law curriculum into which the interviewing project was placed is detailed before outlining the educational theory that justifies the choice of interviewing. The interviewing project is then briefly described.
Improving the Quality of Higher Education: Lessons from Research on Student Learning and Educational Leadership
Authors: Ramsden Paul
Published: June 2021

A few years ago David Minton published a book about teaching skills in adult education.2

To introduce an idea about the importance of the teacher’s experience as a key factor in the quality of learning and teaching, he described his own experience of eating a delicious dish of garlic mushrooms in a restaurant in the Beaujolais. Madame served, and her husband did the cooking. But Minton made a mistake. He asked Madame for the recipe. “Monsieur,” came the withering reply “It is not what, it is who.”

Minton realised then that he had asked the wrong question. The difference between one dish of garlic mushrooms and another does not depend on the recipe, but on the person who cooks it.

Much the same is true of the quality of university teaching and university courses. There are no certain prescriptions for good teaching. There are no foolproof techniques for guaranteeing quality. There are only teachers, and educational effectiveness depends on their professionalism, their experience, and their commitment. We must ask the right questions in the search for quality. We must emphasise the importance of the “who” in order to achieve quality.

What does it take to improve the quality of learning and teaching in higher education? More importantly what will help us, as teachers, to achieve improvement? In this article I would like to illustrate how some of the ideas from student learning research might be used to improve the quality of university education. There are three areas I want to apply these lessons: helping the novice lecturer to become more expert; providing appropriate academic leadership; and using methods of evaluating teaching and courses which combine the need to assure quality with the principal purpose of enhancing it.
Law Teaching Reconceptualised
Authors: Brun Marlene Le , Bond Carol
Published: June 2021

For many years programmes designed to improve the quality of teaching in institutions of higher education focused on how to teach — the techniques of teaching. The Australasian Law Teachers Association Law Teaching Workshop was no exception. This quite technical emphasis parallels a “technical rationalist” perspective, which reflects an epistemology of practice derived from positivist philosophy. The maintenance of such a philosophy allows one to adopt an atomistic view of knowledge, one which is based on the assumption that teaching is a “bag” of skills that we collect and perform; thus, good teachers display a range of techniques and methods which are readily transferable irrespective of subject matter. By divorcing discipline and pedagogical epistemologies, for example in education and law, this approach fails to recognise that good teaching is grounded in a marriage of the two, as we advocate here. Moreover, it inhibits the further development of our understanding of what constitutes good teaching in law.

In this article we describe the redesign of the Australasian Law Teachers Association (ALTA) Law Teaching Workshop, which was made possible by the award of a Commonwealth Staff Development Committee (Cathie) grant to Griffith University and the Queensland University of Technology in 1994. This new, holistic model embodies a reconceptualisation of law teaching in which teaching as a practice is not only embedded in the epistemology of education but also in that of law.
Throwing Students in the Deep End, or Teaching Them how to Swim? Developing ‘Offices’ as a Technique of Law Teaching
Authors: Kift Sally , Airo-Farulla Geoffrey
Published: June 2021

“Offices” (teacher-less, cooperative learning groups) were introduced to Griffith University in the Law School’s first year of teaching in 1992. They were further developed through two National Teaching Development Grants from the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching in 1993 and 1994. The 1993 grant was used to refine the first year program and to develop a second year program as that year was first taught. Similarly the 1994 grant was used to refine the second year program and develop an Office program when third year was first taught. The Offices project has two main aims: to develop in students a range of skills valued by employers, but not traditionally part of the core law curriculum; and to provide “situated” learning of substantive legal material. It was first discussed in an article in this journal in late 1993. As that article noted, the project is still very much in its formative stage, and undergoes continual evaluation and redesign.

This article reports on the developments and lessons learned during the implementation and evaluation of the 1994 grant. Part 1 sets out the cognitive theory underlying Offices and the relationship between the program’s main aims. Part 2 describes the background to the implementation of the 1994 grant, and Part 3 describes the Office tasks formulated during that process. Part 4 summarises the practical lessons we learned about how Offices should be run. Using Collins, Brown and Newman’s framework of “cognitive apprenticeship”, Part 5 evaluates the learning environment that we have constructed in Offices, and proposes paths for future development.

Finally by way of introduction, it should be stated that the observations and conclusions set out in this article draw extensively on the results of a range of evaluative measures. Particularly the 1994 project was evaluated through continual informal student feedback during the life of each program, student surveys conducted at the end of each of the four semester programs, regular sharing of perceptions and analyses between the staff involved in its implementation, through discussion of the Offices project at the Faculty’s governing committee, and by comparing the learning environment with the “cognitive apprenticeship” framework referred to above.
The Moot Reconceived: Some Theory and Evidence on Legal Skills
Authors: Keyes Mary E , Whincop Michael J
Published: June 2021

One of the major contemporary challenges to legal educators is the effective incorporation of skills training into the undergraduate law curriculum. Many of the most interesting issues in curriculum development in law schools are concerned with the identification of skills that should be taught, the subjects with which they should be associated, and the particular means of teaching by which skills can be conveyed to the undergraduate. It is possible simultaneously to affirm the importance of skills training, while feeling uneasy about legal educators’ capacity to give reasoned answers to the above curricular questions. These doubts arise from a lack of useful applications of assessment theory to educational practice, and most particularly, legal educational practice. The way in which teachers assess the material which they teach has far-reaching implications for student learning. Assessment not only influences what, and how, a student learns; it also has pervasive “feedback effects for how one teaches. We argue that this point is especially germane to skills training. Assessment theory informs the structure, content and processes of skills training.
Teaching Native Title
Authors: Castan Melissa , Schultz Jennifer
Published: June 2021

Theories of western jurisprudence have traditionally been dominated by the perspective of the white western male. Feminist jurisprudence has suggested that theories of law which neglect to take into account experiences of women are inadequate; we can no longer ignore the proposition that theories of common law and property, that do not embrace Indigenous experiences are also deficient. Indigenous Australians have been beset by the dominant AngloEuropean discourses, be they legal, historical or anthropological, for over two centuries. These dominant analyses have defined, destroyed, created and modified the rights and lives of Indigenous peoples. It is fair to say that the relentless study of Indigenous people which was fundamental to the colonial construction of “The Aborigine” has been the cause of considerable resentment and pain. The resurgence of these processes of constructing Indigenous needs, aims, rights and identities has become a feature of the mid 1990s, particularly in legal and political discourses.
Women’s Work: The Inclusion of the Voice of Aboriginal Women
Authors: Behrendt Larissa
Published: June 2021

Interesting issues arise around the intersection of including women’s work in any law school curriculum and the experience of Aboriginal women. As an Aboriginal woman it seems a natural personal focus for me. The issues that the meeting of women’s work and the experience of Aboriginal women raises are easily transferred through other areas of law.

The issue of work and Aboriginal women needs to be looked at in an historical context.
Work and Gender in the Law Curriculum
Authors: Owens Rosemary J
Published: June 2021

The construction of the law curriculum in our Law Schools is a crucial matter in the project of engendering the law so that it delivers justice.

Inevitably the law curriculum presents a categorisation, or conceptualisation, of the law. The imposition of these categories is significant in a double sense. The world, including the law, exists for us only through categories. These categories comprise our world. They bring order to an otherwise incomprehensible and unmanageable chaos. For us to be able to engage with the world, it must be reduced to manageable categories. However, the categories which divide and construct the world do not exist independently of human community. Furthermore, the power to impose categories upon the world is a creative act which simultaneously constructs the creator as a subject in the world. In the past the law has been the creation of men not women. And in the law women have been constructed as objects not subjects. The process of curriculum reform is thus an opportunity to create ourselves, women, as subjects in the law in a double way.

Because the construction of the law and the world through the imposition of categories is so important, I will devote most of my attention to this issue. I will, however, also briefly address three other related points — the importance of always seeing the law in its social context, the issue of resources in the new curriculum and a methodology for teaching and learning in the new curriculum.
Uncovering Issues of Sexual Violence in Equity and Trusts Law
Authors: Sarmas Lisa
Published: June 2021

What does the issue of sexual violence against women have to do with Equity and Trusts law? Most students and scholars of the subject would say “very little”. In this paper I argue, on the contrary that the issue of gendered violence does indeed arise in this subject-area but it is usually rendered invisible by an overly narrow view of what counts as appropriate legal scholarship and pedagogy.

The aim of this paper is a modest one: it is to take one narrowly defined “legal” method — case analysis — and turn it on its head so that it forms the basis of a critical, context-sensitive pedagogy which makes space for an exploration of the issue of sexual violence within this subject-area. By employing what I call “critical case analysis” in three doctrinal areas of Equity and Trusts law — undue influence, unconscionable dealing and fiduciary relationships — I hope to show that issues of sexual violence do arise in this subject; that these issues are often omitted or inadequately dealt with by courts and traditional scholars; and that critical case analysis can be a useful pedagogical tool in our classrooms for exposing and exploring such issues.
Teaching About Violence Against Women: An Interdisciplinary Project
Authors: Stubbs Julie
Published: June 2021

My starting point for this paper is to ask the following questions. What are the consequences of taking women’s lives and the violence they experience seriously? What does this mean for our construction of law and for the manner in which we teach it? What skills do our students need in order to integrate knowledge about the violence in women’s lives and what it means for law?

In reflecting on these questions my perspective is necessarily informed by my own experience as a non-lawyer teaching within a law faculty. In one sense what I want to talk about is the converse of Brettel Dawson’s1 project of teaching legal research within a social science faculty — among other things I teach social science research within a law faculty.

In Part 1 of this paper I offer some comments about the project of injecting a gendered perspective into law school curricula. In Part 2 I argue that teaching about violence against women requires an inter-disciplinary approach to legal education. In Part 3 I briefly discuss some of the challenges to teaching about violence against women.
Citizenship, Sovereignty and Globalisation: Teaching International Law in the Post-Soviet Era
Authors: Orford Anne
Published: June 2021

This article will deal with one aspect of feminist research and teaching about international law in the post-Soviet era: the need to think about international law ethically in ways that take account of how international lawyers are located in global networks of power. While international law has long been involved in “the organisation of power relations between white and ‘other’’’, it is particularly important in an era of global economic restructuring to study international law as a process that is implicated in the reproduction of inequality. As Andrea Rhodes-Little suggests:

For feminists … the further challenge thrown down by “other” women is that of how to resist those social practices which produce inequality and divide women against each other within a global context as well as in local contexts. In short, feminists search for ethical practices which are answerable for the power relations they produce. We also search for law which acknowledges its position in the organisation of power relations between women and women and between white and “other”.

My argument about the need for “ethical” practices of teaching and research about international law, practices “which are answerable for the power relations they produce”, can be read as part of a larger debate about the need to reorient legal education and the production of knowledge about legality generally. It also draws on the work of those feminist and critical theorists who argue for the development of an ethical approach to education and to the production of knowledge in areas such as literary theory and cultural studies.

The particular focus of this article is on the ways in which that approach to teaching international law can be explored through the inclusion, in international legal curricula, of material that questions the central notions of citizenship and sovereignty. In the first section, I will sketch some of the ways in which feminist theorists have attempted to ask a different set of questions about citizenship and sovereignty, by contesting the dominant conception of the citizen as a neutral disembodied individual, and by considering the implications of citizenship in a global context. Secondly, I will make some necessarily brief comments about teaching method, addressing the pedagogical issues that are raised when feminist, critical and postcolonial material is included in the law curriculum.
Re/writing Skills Training in Law Schools - Legal Literacy Revisited
Authors: Bell Dean , Pether Penelope
Published: June 2021

This article proposes an interdisciplinary, theoretically informed approach to literacy and language skills in legal education. Both of the authors are legal scholars and law teachers with backgrounds in English studies and literary theory, and we bring these perspectives to bear on the perennial problem of introducing both developmental and remedial language tuition into law schools. The article is informed by a model of language and literacy which views written legal communication skills as the acquisition of competence in, and initiation into, the codes of a culture of specialist discursive practices. That is, it holds that law is made in its languages, rather than that law is a concrete given which language merely describes or articulates, and it views literacy critically and contextually, rather than as a virtue measured against a fixed and objective standard. The article proceeds from a synthesis of recent scholarship from a number of disciplines, including professional studies, sociology, education, teaching English as a second language, linguistics and, of course, law.
Design-a-Court: An Introductory Socio- Legal Assessment Exercise
Authors: Laster Kathy
Published: June 2021

First-year law has always been a challenge for both students and teachers alike. Both groups have high expectations of what can be achieved in an introductory law subject. Students want to master “it”, usually understood as chunks of knowledge, immediately. Teachers understand that the foundations of a good legal education are much more elusive and involve mastery of method, as much as substance. An introductory subject requires finding an appropriate balance between these two elements. Too often the first year curriculum also gets bogged down in abstract “either-or” debates about the importance of “black-letter law” versus critical perspectives about law. Missing from much of the discussion of the first year curriculum are theoretically informed practical strategies which simultaneously develop first year students’ skills in legal analysis, and preserve their capacity to look at law and legal institutions critically.
A Lateral Approach to Assessment
Authors: Barnes Jeffrey
Published: June 2021

Drama lessons for advocates … designing more effective “Wanted” posters …taking the pulse of High Court judges — this work certainly excites thought about assessment (!) The authors were “looking for a way to encourage people to break free of the traditional methods of assessment in their disciplines”. (4) Instead of structuring a book of assessment materials around the various disciplines, they have produced a book which purports to be structured around abilities which are “common to all disciplines”. (4) This is a difficult brief which, unsurprisingly, only partly succeeds. The book is compiled by a team drawn from the Professional Development Centre at the University of New South Wales. The production was funded by a grant from the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching. The materials themselves are largely the work of various academics who responded to the project team’s call for innovative and carefully thought out assessment proposals in their various disciplines. The project team then had the challenging task of turning the various contributions into case studies which were (hopefully)-to be of more general use; in other words, of use to other disciplines. They settled on eight clusters of abilities, which provide the structure for the package