Paul Maharg

Transforming legal education: learning and teaching the law in the early twenty-first century

Paul Maharg presents a critical inquiry into the identity and possibilities of legal education, and an exploration of transformational alternatives to our current theories and practices of teaching and learning the law. His work takes the view that bodies of interdisciplinary theory and knowledge of the history of legal education are important to all stages of legal education. He also argues 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. Transforming Legal Education makes the case for substantial change in the ways law is studied. In a wide-ranging critique of current educational practices in our law schools and in society, the book argues for a contemporary adaptation of John Deweys concept of pragmatic and experiential learning, for a wider interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning, and for greater engagement with technology-enhanced learning. In Part 1 of the book Maharg argues the case for deeper and more sustained interdisciplinary educational practice, drawing upon problem-based learning, rhetorical theory and practice, and approaches to education in other disciplines such as music and literature. The book also argues for a more profound understanding of the history of legal education. In the three case studies that comprise Part 2, Maharg explores three historical episodes in legal educational practice - the formation of the realist curriculum at Columbia in the 1920s; ethical education at Edinburgh University in the later eighteenth century; and thirteenth century glossed texts. Part 3 consists of an extended case study of technology and experiential learning, incorporating aspects of the approaches analysed in Parts 1 and 2. Throughout, the book holds that Deweys critique of education in his day is still relevant to legal education today. His solutions, based upon variants of experiential learning, are taken by Maharg and applied in the extended case study of simulation learning in Part 3. The books conclusion states the case for collaboration between legal educational institutions, and for a more experientially-grounded approach to theory and practice; and ends with a hubristic account of several hours of a students study time in 2047.

Through a screen, darkly: electronic legal education in europe

Abstract Electronic legal education involves the use of information, communication and instructional technologies to enhance students’ learning of the law and to provide law teachers with environments and tools for teaching the law. With the fast growth of the Internet many Law schools and Law faculties are moving their education and training into web environments. This may open new ways of teaching and learning the law by providing students with an environment in which they can manage legal information and legal knowledge for their personal professional use. However, it is clear that throughout Europe there are divergent as well as convergent uses of the web and IT This article explores some of the issues inherent in this, and suggests a number of projects that would enable ICT in legal education to facilitate the aims of the Sorbonne‐Bologna process.

Rogers, constructivism and jurisprudence: Educational critique and the legal curriculum

The focus of this chapter initially is the educational writings of Carl Rogers and the relevance of them to contemporary legal education. Rogers could be described as an extreme example of pragmatist philosophy in action, focusing as he does upon the primacy of experience, and can therefore be cited as one sympathetic to many of the aims of Dewey in the American pragmatist tradition. His work is part of the tradition of humanist education, yet his views also sit well beside a number of contemporary educational and cognitive research directions, all of which have relevance for the teaching and learning of law. In this chapter I shall put forward two arguments. First, I shall argue that Rogers, seldom cited in legal educational literature, has relevance for those involved with legal skills education. Perhaps more significantly, his views on the differences between teaching and learning re-surface in contemporary theory on learning processes, especially constructivist theories and phenomenographical methodologies, which similarly focus on the learning experience. Secondly, and on a wider front, I would argue that both Rogers and constructivism lead us to consider issues which are not only at the heart of educational debates, but are the concerns of jurisprudence as well. In this respect I hope that the chapter will illustrate the overlap between jurisprudence and legal education, and the extent to which educational issues (particularly epistemological ones) are also jurisprudential ones.

Black Box, Pandora's Box or Virtual Toolbox? An Experiment in a Journal's Transparent Peer Review on the Web

Abstract We all accept that peer review is an essential part of journal publication in all disciplines, but almost everyone is agreed that it could be improved. This article describes an experiment in peer review with a legal education journal The Law Teacher. It reports on the process, and describes ways in which the process can be improved for the future.

Situated learning and the management of learning : a case study

Abstract Situated learning, focusing on the pragmatic and social aspects of learning, has as its basis the notion that learning is essentially dependent on the immediate situation of action. It is a strength of the theory that it supports learner‐centred instructional design (ID), and supports a constructivist approach to ID. Nevertheless, even a learner‐centred theory such as situated learning requires more if its product is to be successful in facilitating learning. Student learning requires management at every level: within individual learning activities, within a module syllabus and within a curriculum. The contextual issues which go to make up such management, and the relations between situated learning theory and learning management, are the focus of this paper. We shall argue that it is essential for the success of embedded IT that instructional designers pay attention to learning management issues, that they signal the presence of these issues in their courseware documentation, and that lecturers and tutors who use the courseware should take these issues into account when implementing and embedding computer‐based learning in the curriculum. As an example of this argument we take our computer‐based learning program the Virtual Court Action. This program was designed to be used in the learning and teaching of procedural law in a Scottish university law curriculum. Using document assembly techniques and email, this program emulates part of a civil court action in a Scottish court, with identical personnel, legal documents and procedure. The place of situated learning theory in its design is described, and the learning management issues germane to its implementation are analysed. Finally, we show how the attention paid to learning management issues contributed to the success of the program. ‘Acting on the world to learn about concepts is not a straightforward issue.‘1 ‘Old‐fashioned pocket knives … have a device for removing stones from horses’ hooves. People with this device may know its use and be able to talk wisely about horses, hooves and stones. But they may never betray ‐ or even recognise ‐ that they would not begin to know how to use this implement on a horse.‘2

The culture of mnemosyne: open‐book assessment and the theory and practice of legal education

The concept of open book assessment is inherently controversial, not least because it contradicts a basic condition of examinations, one so basic to the event that we rarely question it: the single confrontation of examinee with exam question, the element of isolated and unaided struggle Jacob wrestling with the mysterious Other. Surely it is cheating to allow texts into an exam-hall? What is the point of the exercise then?

Transactional Legal Learning on the Web

‘Transactional learning’ at its simplest means learning from doing transactions. When professionals learn they often do so, as Donald Schon reminds us, by learning from within transactions – ‘knowing-in-action’. By this Schon means that professionals solve problems by constructing for themselves a repertoire of precedents, images and remembered actions. Problems are not solved by using rules alone, but are framed or constructed according to the repertoire. Professionals try out solutions for fit, re-frame, feed back to themselves, try out other solutions. The result is what Schon calls ‘;reflection-in-action’. According to him, this is what produces the doctors “feel’ for a specific diagnosis, or a lawyers ‘feel’ for a case, (Schon 1983).

Presence, emergence and knowledge objects: user interaction in a virtual learning environment

How do students study with webcasts? How do the new media change their ways of learning? How can video, sound, multimedia and text be combined optimally to produce a learning environment that is attractive, stylish, and productive of deep learning, for students, trainees and practitioners? In this report we focus on the interim results from a long-term project tracking student use of a VLE. We shall demonstrate briefly the functionality of the environment, then summarise the extensive user data we have gathered. In more detail, we shall analyse the responses of users to the splicing of video and text. Our findings verify a number of approaches to learning advocated by the phenomenographical literature, and we shall summarise this. Throughout, we offer practical guidelines to the use of webcasts in VLEs, and discuss the extent to which such environments can be used in legal education and training.

Editorial: Learning/Technology

This special issue is not the answer, because perhaps it was the wrong question – or maybe a question was the wrong syntax. For technology is not a question, and neither is it an answer to any question. It is quite simply the condition that we find ourselves in, and always have. Indeed it is scarcely possible to think of learning without technology, or vice versa, or learning coming about without some form of technology being part of the experience. That fused relationship, the phenomenology of which is explored in this special issue, is a relationship I shall describe as “learning/ technology”. And there seems to be ever more to interpret and use in legal education when we consider the current field of learning/technology: innovation is ceaseless. Three brief examples reveal the scale of innovation which, I would hazard a guess, will continue to be developed in the next decade:

An overture for well-tempered regulators: four variations on a LETR theme

This paper is a development of the Association of Law Teachers’ annual Lord Upjohn lecture, delivered on 29 January 2015 at City Law School, London, by the principal investigators of the Legal Education and Training Review’s (LETR) research team. In it, each of the authors takes a different theme arising from the LETR Report, and explores its implications and application, focusing on research and innovation; access and flexibility; deprofessionalisation, and, finally, reflecting on the way the Report addressed themes of common training, oversupply and access to justice. As our title indicates, the paper comprises both individual performances and performance as a consort, and we hope that in this way, we enact one of our key themes: the social nature of legal education and its regulation.