What is the "Q" for?

This paper is based on the Law Teacher of the Year keynote speech delivered at the Association of Law Teachers’ Annual Conference in April 2011 in Cardiff, Wales. Some refinement of the ideas expressed then took place and a further presentation formed my inaugural Readership seminar at Nottingham Law School in June 2011. The essence of the speeches was to seek to address the fitness for purpose of the Qualifying Law Degree (QLD) in the context of contemporary legal education, but more recently has focused the need for the requirements of the QLD better to reflect and promote what is best about law and legal education. Thus, rather than skills being incidental to academic legal study, I suggest that certain discipline-specific cognitive professional skills should replace the foundation subjects in the QLD. This paper concludes with some sample programmes designed to meet legal intellectual professional skills that meet the needs of the law student in the early 21st century whilst respecting institutional autonomy in legal curriculum design

Putting theory into practice: designing a curriculum according to self-determination theory

Building on existing research into the affective domain in legal education, volition and self-determination theory (SDT), we explain how to categorise student motivation types and design a curriculum which meets and supports, or at least does not undermine or damage, students' intrinsic or extrinsic motivations. This categorisation process allows the curriculum designer to obtain a fresh insight into student engagement, particularly by appreciating how to enhance the active forms of extrinsic student motivation, which leads students to internalize their goals, take over the responsibility for their learning and develop a strong sense of value for their choices. That insight, coupled with an appreciation of SDT's identification of the three human motivational needs (autonomy, competence and relatedness), allows the curriculum designer consciously to address learning, teaching and assessment at a macro- and micro-design level. As one method of approaching curriculum design, we show how to change the learning culture; the environment enables a stronger understanding of students’ behaviours, volition and motivation, creating new ways for the students to internalise their extrinsic motivation (own their learning), leading to fully self-determined actions

Reforming the Role of Magistrates: Implications for Summary Justice in England and Wales

This paper examines current government proposals to reorient and ‘strengthen’ the function of lay magistrates through the creation of new magisterial responsibilities such as oversight of out of court disposals and greater involvement with local justice initiatives. It is argued that, taken in isolation, these measures will fail to consolidate the role of magistrates in summary justice unless they are enacted alongside other measures which aim to reaffirm the status of lay justices, and which seek to reverse the trend which has prioritised administrative efficiency at the expense of lay justice