Elaine Dewhurst

Field Trips as Short-Term Experiential Learning Activities in Legal Education

Field trips offer students the opportunity to learn in a real-world setting and bridge the gap between theory and practice. To date, there has been a dearth of both theoretical and empirical research into the use and effectiveness of field trips as a pedagogic tool in legal education. This article seeks to fill this gap, first by analysing the current research on the use of field trips in higher education across different disciplines and the reported advantages and disadvantages of such usage, and secondly by providing empirical evidence on the benefits of such activities from a field trip, “Living the Law: A Tour of Legal Dublin”, undertaken with students in Dublin City University, Ireland. The tour involved visits to important legal establishments in the city of Dublin, including the Supreme Court, the training institutions of barristers and solicitors in Ireland and a premier legal firm. The article analyses feedback from the students who took this trip on the benefits of such a learning experience.

The Development of EU Case‐Law on Age Discrimination in Employment: ‘Will You Still Need Me? Will You Still Feed Me? When I'm Sixty‐Four’

This article addresses the development of age discrimination law in the Court of Justice and concludes that there is a marked difference in the level of discretion given to Member States in cases relating to mandatory retirement policies. The article will critique the approach of the Court of Justice to the legitimate objective test and the proportionality test in retirement cases. It will also argue that the decisions of the Court of Justice to date have all involved cases with very similar factual scenarios, and the article hypothesises how a different conclusion might be reached in cases with different factors. It also considers the impact of the Charter of Fundamental Rights on such cases. The article concludes by arguing that mandatory retirement policies may no longer be compatible with EU law and that there is a need to move towards more flexible retirement policies.

Field Trips as Teaching Tools in the Law Curriculum

While field trips are often employed in primary and even second level education as a pedagogical tool, aimed at exposing students to real life experiences, such activities are not as popular at third level (Falk and Balling, 1982; Muse et al., 1982; Anderson and Zhang, 2003). However, such experiential learning techniques can be invaluable to university students by allowing them to engage more with the world around them and to see a practical side to their area of study. Scarce indentifies field trips as a form of ‘short-term experiential education’ and comments that ‘what students learn and the way they learn it should be rooted in society and in social experiences’ (Scarce, 1997, p. 219). He locates these activities in the experiential learning framework, as espoused by educationalists such as Dewey (1938) and DeMartini (1983). This short article contains an analysis of academic literature on the use of field trips in third level education and their potential value in the law curriculum. Law is a suitable subject to explore through the use of such trips, as lecturers endeavour to illustrate how the rules and principles propounded in legal instruments and cases influence society and how, concomitantly, societal changes and opinions influence the creation and development of law.