In this article, I argue that alternative assessments should be used in law schools to re-orientate student learning towards a broader, liberal arts education in law. Students should be given new assessments that challenge them to think for themselves about…
In the early 1980s, Geoffrey Robertson was approached by a CBS broadcaster to create the first of his ‘Hypotheticals’ for American television. [1] The premise of the show was simple. In each episode, Robertson, an established QC, would pose hypotheticals…
I was recently given an advanced copy of Zoe Durand’s Inside Family Law: Conversations from the Coalface. I decided to review the book, in part because it sounded interesting to read firsthand accounts of family law in practice. Below is my…
This is a brief excerpt from my book Legal Education, Privatization and the Market, about the role universities play in guiding young law students away from charity and towards private practice.
The history of law schools is a battle of ideas. Ideas over what the law is, how it should
be taught and the kinds of student a law school should produce. Frequently,
law schools have been the battleground of fierce intellectual rivalries, with
rival schools of thought battling for supremacy.
In a true Socratic law school, I suggest, students would be instructed to ask questions to those in authority instead of answering them. Nothing and no one would be beyond a student’s questioning, especially by virtue of claims to authority or expertise alone.
From their very first lectures, law students are told not to equate legal ethics with morality, to ignore emotional responses to cases and to ignore any idea of reforming the law. Instead, they are taught legal positivism or ‘pure law’. Pure law…
My purposes in this article are narrowed to two points : (i) a statement of the teaching of law subjects in Canadian Universities for purposes and aims other than those to which Dean Falconbridge has done full justice ; (ii) to outline the work with which I am most familiar, in the University of Toronto.
I find it interesting sometimes to contrast the narrow, vocational-based education system we have today with the kind of education system envisaged in the late 1700s. Often, the aim back then was to receive a broad-education in what today we…
In the process of writing my PhD, I have stumbled upon the writings of WPM Kennedy, the former Dean of Toronto Law School and writer of ‘Law as a Social Science’. Writing in the 1930s, Kennedy believed that law should…