To all three of my readers, apologies for my disappearance over the past year and more. Many things intervened, including job changes, illness, house moves ending up here on the Isle of Skye; the acquisition of a giant collie and a motorbike (more of which anon), the renewal of old acquaintances, Hannah Arendt, Adam Ferguson and others, and the appearance of some remarkable and uncomfortable new ones – GPT4 among them.
So what’s new? I’m now working part-time. I’m with Osgoode Professional Development, working on multimedia for professional lawyers, curriculum design and forms of simulation for legal learning. And I’m with Newcastle Law School, working again on sims and other aspects of legal ed.
I’m working on two projects and three books. First project below, and the second project and the books in later posts. LENA, Legal Education in the North Atlantic, arose from the perennial condition of growing up in a small jurisdiction. Why do we never hear from small jurisdictions? What’s it like to be educated, and to educate, in one? To live in the interstices beside and between much larger, hegemonic jurisdictions? What do small jurisdictional spaces theories and practices have to contribute to legal educational literatures? Talking to Kryss Macleod, a Scot from the Outer Hebridean island of Barra, we realised we had the same interests in these and many similar questions. And thus the project came into being. We’re exploring the legal educations in Nova Scotia, Iceland, Denmark, Faroes, Scotland, N Ireland, Ireland and Wales. We’ve had an online workshop with participants from the above jurisdictions, and we’re now engaged in writing the chapters of a book for Emerging Legal Education which I believe will be the first such book anywhere in the world to examine small jurisdictions across a specific region – in our case, the North Atlantic.
Indeed the closest texts to our projected study are from sister disciplines – literary, cultural and anthropological studies. An example would be Glenda Norquay and Gerry Smith’s edited book entitled Across the Margins: Cultural Identity and Change in the Atlantic Archipelago, an example of the shift from nation-state histories to archipelagic histories that take account of margins and peripheries. In the literatures of such places there are strains of resistance, analysis, critique and delight in the explorations of such places and themes. Dwelling on them, the Scots poet W.N. Herbert gave us reasons for ‘Why the Elgin Marbles Must Be Returned to Elgin’:
Because they are large, round and bluey
and would look good on the top of Lady Hill
Because their glassy depths would give local kids
the impression that they are looking at
the Earth from outer space.
Several Earths in fact, which encourages humility
and a sense of relativity.
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Because Scotland must see visions again,
even if only through
a marble of convenience.1
More in future posts on content and methods of this project. But first and last, many thanks to Gavin Maxwell for helping me with the revived WordPress website – a digital master at bringing the dead to life.
- W.N. Herbert, Cabaret McGonagall, Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe Books, 1996, pp. 36-7. If you’re not Scots, Elgin is a small coastal town in the north-east of Scotland. ↩︎