Polding et al. on Online Teaching of Skills and Accounts in the Legal Practice Course

Liz Polding of the Oxford Institute of Legal Practice, and James Catchpole and Jill Cripps, both of The College of Law, have published Interaction and Reflection: A New Approach to Skills and Accounts Teaching on the Legal Practice Course, 24 International Review of Law, Computers, and Technology 83-92 (2010) (Issue no. 1). Here is the abstract:

‘Acceptance of the online environment as just another space for learning does not deny its potential to reconceptualize what is possible in teaching and learning’ (Alexander and Boud)1 This paper considers how the development of this resource moves the use of interactive learning in law further, in the way posited by Alexander and Boud, into a new, flexible, learner centred environment. The philosophy behind both Legal Practice Course (LPC) Skills Online and LPC Accounts online is that the online learning space is the primary resource, rather than supplementing or enhancing a textbook. The interactive environment provides an opportunity to practise legal skills and accounts, combined with detailed feedback and tools for formal reflection. This structure guides learners through a complete learning cycle. The interactive exercises, mainly using case studies, are completed at the learner’s own pace and a longer case study brings the skills together to provide context.

Conferences: Future Ed: New Business Models for U.S. & Global Legal Education

Three conferences on the topic, Future Ed: New Business Models for U.S. and Global Legal Education, have been announced:

New York Law School and Harvard Law School are hosting a year-long contest of ideas about legal education. The goal is to come up with operational alternatives to the traditional law school business model and to identify concrete steps for the implementation of new designs. The kickoff event is a two-day conference for educators, employers, and regulators at New York Law School on April 9-10, 2010, to identify problems, innovations and constraints, and to organize working groups to develop designs and strategies for implementation. Working groups will refine their ideas and reconvene for a second meeting at Harvard Law School on October 15-16, 2010. Final designs will be presented, with commentary, at New York Law School in April, 2011.

The Carnegie Report, entitled Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Practice of Law (2007), will figure prominently in the conference discussions, according to the conference announcement.

These conferences are likely to be of interest to legal informatics and legal communication researchers, because legal information and communications technology is likely to figure prominently in the conference discussions.

To register for the April 2010 conference at New York Law School, or to request more information, please see the announcement.

HT Debbie Maranville at Best Practices for Legal Education Blog.

Call for Papers: [Law School] Clinical Theory Workshop: 25th Anniversary Celebration & Conference

A call for papers — with abstract submission deadline of 1 April 2010 and first draft deadline of June 15, 2010 — has been issued for the [Law School] Clinical Theory Workshop: 25th Anniversary Celebration & Conference, to be held 30 September-2 October 2010, at New York Law School, in New York, New York, USA.

The theme of the conference is “Twenty-five years of clinical scholarship: What have we learned, and what should we work on next?”

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• “lawyering skills;
• pedagogy;
• supervision;
• legal practice;
• the nature of lawyers’ expertise;
• the representation of communities;
• interviewing;
• ABA standards, including outcomes assessment and changes in Standard 405(c);
• ‘engaged client-centeredness’;
• difference and similarity between lawyer and client;
• supporting client decisionmaking while still bringing the lawyer’s insights and even moral views to the table;
• working with atypical clients;
• using narrative as a lens for understanding clients;
• integrating skills and ethics (for example, in the lawyer’s attention to truth and her explanations of the law); and
• understanding the nature of expert, as distinguished from novice, client-centered practice.”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

Hibbitts on The Technology of Law

Associate Dean Bernard J. Hibbitts of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and the Publisher and Editor in Chief of JURIST, has published The Technology of Law, 102 Law Library Journal 101 (2010) (Issue No. 1). This article was “adapted from a plenary address given at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries, May 26, 2009, Halifax, Nova Scotia.” Here is the abstract:

Professor Hibbitts argues that contemporary fascination with the law of technology has led us to overlook the fundamental impact of the “technology of law,” and offers suggestions for creating “neterate” lawyers more comfortable and conversant with technology itself. He describes how the legal news service JURIST implements many of these suggestions and provides a unique learning experience for its law student staffers.

2010 Boulder Summer Conference on Legal Information: Teaching & Scholarship

[NOTE: Updated on 15 February 2010 to link directly to the call for papers and to specify the topics.]

The Second Boulder Summer Conference on Legal Information: Teaching and Scholarship, will be held 8-10 July 2010, at the University of Colorado School of Law, in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

A call for papers for the conference, with submission deadline of 19 March 2010, was distributed on the American Association of Law Libraries’ Academic Law Libraries Special Interest Section (AALL ALL-SIS) listserv (restricted to AALL ALL-SIS members) on 27 January 2010.

Papers are invited on “any aspect of legal information, with preference given to papers dealing with legal information literacy.”

Felker: Demonstration Project of Interoperability between UC Digital Law Libraries and Legal Clinical Training Opportunities based in California County Law Libraries

Christopher D. Felker, Esq., of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Boalt Hall, has posted Demonstration Project of Interoperability between UC Digital Law Libraries and Legal Clinical Training Opportunities based in California County Law Libraries (Dec. 2009). Here is the abstract:

David A. Greenbaum, then Director, Interactive University Project, UC Berkeley provided the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with a report of work undertaken by UC Berkeley, Indiana University, Stanford University, and the UC California Digital Library to plan a demonstration project of digital library and educational technology interoperability.

The work on which that report was based was conducted from August to September 2004 with the generous support of a $12,000 Officer’s Grant.

This proposal revisits some of the core concepts outlined in that preliminary work and suggests a demonstration project wherein a UC-based digital law library partners with an existing County Law Library to offer legal clinical education and training. For discussion purposes only, the present proposal posits a relationship between the Hugh and Hazel Darling Law Library at UCLA Law and the LA Law Library. In reality, productive public university – public agency partnerships could be formed at any UC Law School (UC Berkeley – Alameda County; UC Irvine – Orange County; UC Hastings – San Francisco County; UC Davis – Yolo / Sacramento County). The fullest realization would be to leverage a common digital library platform to offer clinical training on ‘retail’ level legal problems which many patrons of the county law library must confront on a pro se footing (bankruptcy, foreclosure, divorce separation in both marital and domestic partnership arrangements and the formation of sole proprietorship or limited liability businesses).

Valentine on Legal Research as a Fundamental Skill

Professor Sarah Valentine of City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law has published Legal Research as a Fundamental Skill: A Lifeboat for Students and Law Schools, 39 University of Baltimore Law Review 175 (2009). Here is the abstract:

“This article argues that current legal research education is dangerously deficient and demonstrates how it can be reconceptualized to become a synergistic first year course that supports the learning of doctrine and legal analysis, as well as necessary research skills in accordance with recent suggestions by the ABA, the authors of the Carnegie Report, and other legal commentators.

“Most law schools provide legal research instruction that is not only ineffective in teaching basic research skills but is potentially hazardous to students attempting to learn legal analysis. The ability to electronically search and access law has created a paradigm shift that has affected the very framework of the law as it has been understood and taught for the past one hundred and thirty years. The very act of accessing the law electronically restructures the law itself. It erodes the idea that one can learn the law from the scientific study of readily agreed upon precedent. As the historical understanding of law shifts, the ability to teach students to ‘think like lawyers’ using the structured concepts of the legal system developed in the 1880s, but still relied on by law professors today, begins to collapse.

“Creating an excellent legal research course is not necessarily difficult. It requires that legal research be taught as both a fundamental legal skill, requiring analysis and doctrinal knowledge and as a fundamental lawyering skill, integrated into the entire first year curriculum, not merely linked to legal writing. In addition, it must teach information literacy skills and the teaching should be informed with adult learning methodologies. Such a course provides students not only with the necessary research skills for law practice, but assists them in building the conceptual framework necessary for legal analysis.”

2010 International Congress of Comparative Law

The XVIIIth International Congress of Comparative Law, to be held 25 July to 1 August 2010, at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Washington, DC, USA, features many papers on legal information or legal communication, which may be of interest to legal informatics or legal communication researchers.

Sessions of interest to legal informatics or legal communication researchers include the following:

• Legal History and Ethnology: Legal Culture and Legal Transplants;
• Association of American Law Schools Section on Comparative Law – A Dialogue on Comparative Law in the Curriculum;
• Special Session: Comparative Perspectives on the Role of Transparency in the Administration of Law;
• Criminal Procedure: The Exclusionary Rule;
• Constitutional Law: Constitutional Courts as “Positive Legislators”;
• Special Session (to take place at The World Bank): Comparative and International Government Procurement Law: Stepping Stones to Reform [may address egovernment and econtracting];
• Civil Procedure: Collective Actions;
• Legal Education : The Role of Practice in Legal Education;
• Private International Law: Recent Private International Law Codifications;
• Special Session : Latin America – Comparative Legal Interpretation;
• Comparative Law and Unification of Laws: Complexity of Transnational Sources.

Click here for the complete conference agenda.

HT @thetrialwarrior.

Legal Educational Methods & Technology: Special Issue of JILT

The new issue of JILT: Journal of Information, Law & Technology is a special issue devoted to legal educational methods & technology, and contains a number of articles that may be of interest to legal informatics/communications scholars:

• Simon Ball & Helen James, Making Law Teaching Accessible and Inclusive.
• Abstract: “Best practice in teaching suggests considering a wide range of ways in which learning can be enabled, some of which can be supported by the use of technology. Legislation requires that teaching be inclusive to students with a range of needs including disabilities. This paper introduces a variety of ways in which technology can be integrated into everyday law teaching practice to enhance accessibility and inclusion. Many of these techniques do not require law teachers to be experts in the use of technology, and some can be integrated into everyday practice with minimal effort. Suggestions for ‘reasonable adjustments’ are given in relation to a range of user needs, and case studies exemplifying some strategies adopted by particular institutions in moving towards more inclusive law teaching are described. Finally this paper suggests seven questions law teachers might ask in order to determine their approach to inclusion in relation to each piece of learning – whether they change the current medium of delivery, add to it by offering a range of routes to achieving the learning outcomes, or provide alternatives as and when required.”
• Sefton Bloxham, Fiona Boyle, & Ann Thanaraj, Using E-portfolios to Support PDP and Reflective Learning within the Law Curriculum: A Case Study.
• Abstract: “This paper describes and evaluates a project at the University of Cumbria designed to pilot the development of e-portfolios, using PebblePad software, in support of an embedded programme of personal development planning and reflective learning within the law curriculum. The paper outlines both the national and institutional context as well as the pedagogic rationale for the project, drawing on a range of literature on PDP, e-portfolios, reflective learning and assessment. It then describes in further detail how the use of e-portfolios is used to support PDP and reflective learning and how the programme is embedded within the curriculum. The paper then assesses the evaluative data obtained through student questionnaires, student focus groups and staff reflection. Finally, the paper concludes with some general observations on the success of pilot.”
• Michael Bromby, Virtual Seminars: Problem-based Learning in Healthcare Law and Ethics.
• Abstract: “A series of problem-based learning scenarios were introduced using asynchronous discussion boards as a substitute for tutor-led face-to-face classroom seminars on and undergraduate LLB ‘healthcare law and ethics’ elective module. The scenarios contained ethical dilemmas, many of which could be solved by a number of alternative means. Student responses, therefore, were not ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in the traditional sense but a variety of responses could be seen as appropriate, given that a supportive ethical framework or argument was presented within an answer. Feedback suggested that the students enjoyed the experience and gained a deeper understanding of the topics through advanced preparation and the ensuing discussion. Full student evaluation was conducted to evaluate the project on completion. The aim was to encourage greater student participation and co-operation in a class where many students had been extremely reluctant to offer an opinion or to challenge each other’s views. Written communications appeared to create a more thoughtful discussion and reduce confrontations when discussing potentially controversial topics. Following the precepts set out in Kolb’s learning cycle, the students were given the opportunity to reflect on their own group’s findings in light of the other groups’ feedback and comments. By confronting all sides of the debate and examining sources which may or may not support their own reading the students have brought about a transformation in their existing knowledge; a goal of constructivist learning.”
• Caroline Coles, The Role of New Technology in Improving Engagement among Law Students in Higher Education.
• Abstract: “The aim of this article is to review the pedagogic benefits of the Web 2.0 tool, the wiki, and recorded lectures for the purpose of improving engagement among post graduate students in higher education. It reviews key educational theories, features of the modern student community and recent reports on the use of technology in education. It summarises research into student perceptions of the use of the wiki and recorded lecture. The conclusions are that students value the flexibility of these tools but their technological skill is still low, their contributions are restricted by emotive issues but where these are overcome a higher level of evaluative skill is demonstrated.”
• Catherine Easton, An Examination of Clicker Technology Use in Legal Education.
• Abstract: “Recent technological developments have led to a situation in which the employment of clicker technology in the law school lecture theatre is now a feasible possibility. Influential studies carried out in pure science disciplines (Hake, 1998; Crouch and Mazur, 2001) indicate positive results in both engagement and assessment success attributed to extensive clicker use. There is however a paucity of studies outlining the tailoring of this technology to the specific nature of legal education. This paper presents the findings of a small-scale use of clicker technology within the context of a wider study addressing issues of lecture engagement across a law course. These observations are drawn into the existing debate on clicker use by highlighting key emerging themes and commenting upon their potential impact within the field of legal education. An overview is then presented of the small body of literature on clicker use to teach law. This is then analysed to make observations on the opportunities for legal education presented by clicker technology and the factors affecting its adoption on a law school-wide basis.”

Review of: Paul Maharg, Transforming Legal Education: Learning and Teaching the Law in the Early Twenty-first Century.

• Abstract: “Transforming Legal Education … argues that bodies of interdisciplinary theory and a knowledge of the history of legal education are important to all stages of legal education, and that new learning designs such as transactional learning need to be developed to help students, educators and lawyers deal with the transitions and challenges facing them now and in the foreseeable future. Throughout, discussions of theory are spliced with case studies of academic and professional legal learning, particularly in the field of technology-enhanced learning. …”

HT Professor Ioannis Iglezakis.

Olszewska & Baker, An Annotated Bibliography on Law Teaching

Mary Olszewska, J.D., & Professor Thomas E. Baker of Florida International University College of Law, have published An Annotated Bibliography on Law Teaching, forthcoming in Perspectives: Teaching Legal Research and Writing. Here is the abstract:

“This annotated bibliography was prepared for the panel on Diverse Teaching Methods Designed to Improve the Education of Law Students at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (Aug. 3, 2009). It is offered as a resource to law teachers. It self-consciously and selectively surveys books and more recent articles with an emphasis on teaching qua teaching. It does not include articles specific to particular courses or subjects. Each entry appears only once. The categories and assignments are somewhat subjective but helpful for canvassing a rich literature. The online resources themselves include still more bibliographies.”