In this article, I argue that alternative assessments should be used in law schools to re-orientate student learning […]
Category Archive: Law
In the early 1980s, Geoffrey Robertson was approached by a CBS broadcaster to create the first of his […]
I was recently given an advanced copy of Zoe Durand’s Inside Family Law: Conversations from the Coalface. I decided […]
Law Schools are Failing Their Students
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 […]
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 […]
In the process of writing my PhD, I have stumbled upon the writings of WPM Kennedy, the former […]
New Intrigue 