Online Clinical Legal Education: Challenging the Traditional Model

It has been suggested that the “Digital Age provides an opportunity to revitalize and modernize legal education and to make it more individualized, relevant, human, and accessible”. Delivery of law degree programs fully online is one way the internet has begun to change, if not (yet) revolutionise, legal education in the twenty-first century.  In Australia, law students have been able to obtain their law degree online for a number of years.  Online clinical legal education, however, is still in its infancy.In this article, the authors argue that the greater use of technology in legal education is inevitable, and law schools offering degrees fully online will continue to increase, at least in Australia. The rewards and risks of online legal education are considered from the perspective of a law school in which over 80% of its 855 students study law fully online. The development and implementation of clinical opportunities for students studying online also is discussed.

Smoke, curtains and mirrors: the production of race through time and title registration

This article analyses the temporal effects of title registration and their relationship to race. It traces the move away from the retrospection of pre-registry common law conveyancing and toward the dynamic, future-oriented Torrens title registration system. The Torrens system, developed in early colonial Australia, enabled the production of ‘clean’, fresh titles that were independent of their predecessors. Through a process praised by legal commentators for ‘curing’ titles of their pasts, this system produces indefeasible titles behind its distinctive ‘curtain’ and ‘mirror’, which function similarly to magicians’ smoke and mirrors by blocking particular realities from view. In the case of title registries, those realities are particular histories of and relationships with land, which will not be protected by property law and are thus made precarious. Building on interdisciplinary work which theorises time as a social tool, I argue that Torrens title registration produces a temporal order which enables land market coordination by rendering some relationships with land temporary and making others indefeasible. This ordering of relationships with land in turn has consequences for the human subjects who have those relationships, cutting futures short for some and guaranteeing permanence to others. Engaging with Renisa Mawani and other critical race theorists, I argue that the categories produced by Torrens title registration systems materialise as race