Professional legal education in Scotland

Scotland is a small jurisdiction. With a legal profession of approximately 9000 solicitors and over 450 practicing advocates serving a population of around 5 million, our legal bar is smaller in size than the legal bar of many states in the United States.1 Our solutions to problems of professional education are appropriate to our jurisdictional size, our character, and our history. However, one theme of this Article is that common educational issues exist among jurisdictions despite differences in size or in legal structure. Another theme deals with a matter of particular concern in Scotland, namely the problem of educating for practice, and in particular creating the most effective forms of program and curriculum design for training and education at the professional stage. Part I of this Article summarizes the current Scottish professional legal education program, set in the context of the legal education and the legal profession generally. Part II illustrates some aspects of the professional education program with reference to a case study, the Diploma in Legal Practice at the Glasgow Graduate School of Law. Finally, this Article outlines some of the issues or themes from the Scottish experience that might be applicable to alternatives to the United States' Bar Exam

'Democracy begins in conversation’: the phenomenology of problem-based learning and legal education

Learning is complex for any number of reasons. One of these is that it doesn’t take place in a laboratory: it happens in real places, within and between real people, and as a consequence it takes place in multi-factorial environments. At every stage of learning in Higher Education (HE), from student choice of institution and programme, to the transfer of learning from theory to practice, to a single institution’s or a teacher’s evaluation of teaching and learning, there are many causal factors that affect educational process and outcome. The complexities and variables created by the interaction of such multiple factors, well known in the field of education, make learning a highly complex phenomenon to analyse and understand

Editorial: BILETA special issue: Technology and Legal Education

Fragmentation and convergence are two discoursal lenses that have been used to view changes that have taken place in the domains of legal services,the legal profession, regulation and legal education. While they may appear orthogon al, the relationships between them are intimate, sophisticated, constantly shifting and require much more analysis. In this paper I shall argue that law schools need to engage with both processes for they are powerful actants upon the way we perceive our schools and our roles within them. They are also powerful forces upon what and how we teach, and the nature of the knowledge that is the focus of our heuristics. To exemplify this argument and to begin to examine its strength as a tool for analysis I shall focus on one area of legal education, namely the three fields of legal information literacies, legal informatics and legal writing. I shall argue that the sum of the convergence of all three would significantly improve the educational effects of the parts in our curricula. I shall explore how studies in New Media on media convergence give us models for such convergence, and can reveal the educational effects that the process may bring about

On the edge: ICT and the transformation of professional legal education

Information and communications technology in professional legal education courses is perceived as problematic for teachers and course designers. It is so not because technology is inherently difficult or strange, but because at a deep level it can threaten the practice and identity of teachers. However the contextual challenges of their position, caught between academy and practice, may actually enable professional legal educators to take account of new technologies. The article discusses this proposal, using the example of the incremental development of a discussion forum. It suggests that the tools of pragmatist and transformative meta-theory may point the way forward for professional legal educators to create their own community of practice in the use of ICT in professional legal learning

Death masks and professional masks: community, values and ethics in legal education

This article is a case-study of simulation as a way of learning values and ethics, an approach implemented curriculum-wide within a postgraduate, professional legal educational programme, the Diploma in Professional Legal Practice, in Scotland. It involves learning face-to-face using conventional print resources, and also involves online digital resources. While the use of the web to simulate a professional environment is nothing new in itself, the implementation of it (first in the Glasgow Graduate School of Law and then Strathclyde Law School) and on this scale is fairly unique. The article explores the genesis of this approach, its interdisciplinary bases, and its use in various law schools, its effects in building learning communities and facilitating ethical self-revelation

Virtual learning environments in action

In this workshop Paul and Patricia demonstrated the webcast lectures developed at Glasgow Graduate School of Law as part of a learning environment where students can take control of their own learning experience. They outlined the practical benefits of such a learning environment for both professional and undergraduate legal education, and discussed the theoretical implications of this approach for the pedagogy of legal education

Interview met Paul Maharg

Paul Maharg is professor of law at the Australian National University College of Law and Nottingham Law School, and author of Transforming Legal Education – Learning and Teaching the Law in the Early Twenty-first Century. Maharg has been re-thinking current forms of legal education, the role of emotions therein and use of technology in educating legal professionals that matter for the future of law practice

On the edge: ICT and the transformation of professional legal learning

Information and communications technology in professional legal education courses is perceived as problematic for teachers and course designers. It is so not because technology is inherently difficult or strange, but because at a deep level it can threaten the practice and identity of teachers. However the contextual challenges of their position, caught between academy and practice, may actually enable professional legal educators to take account of new technologies. The article discusses this proposal, using the example of the incremental development of a discussion forum. It suggests that the tools of pragmatist and transformative meta-theory may point the way forward for professional legal educators to create their own community of practice in the use of ICT in professional legal learning