Category: professional education

  • Legal Innovation & Education Workshop, Toronto

    I’m at Osgoode for the next couple of months, and yesterday attended the Legal Innovation & Education Workshop organised by the Winkler Institute for Dispute Resolution, Thomson Reuters (TR) and Osgoode Hall Law School‘s Office for Experiential Education, and held in TR’s downtown offices.  This is a mix of liveblog & later comment on the…

  • Brian Inkster in Toronto

    Am at a legal innovation roundtable sponsored by Thomson Reuters, in TR’s building, Bay St, downtown Toronto, at the invitation of Monica Goyal, an innovator and practitioner in Toronto who works with Osgoode and is the founder of Aluvion.  Brian Inkster is the guest speaker, introduced by Mitch Kowalski, a chapter in whose book The Great…

  • Common entrance exams and the SQE: the wrong story

    The SQE is the Solicitors Qualifying Exam in England and Wales.  It’s an example of a common entrance examination, something a number of legal education regulators are interested in, or already practising.  I was discussing it last night in downtown Toronto, at Osgoode Professional Development, in the context of legal education generally, asking nine questions of…

  • Centre for Legal Education (CLE) Conference, Nottingham Law School, Notts Trent University, session 1

    At the kind behest of Pamela Henderson, my colleague at NLS, I’ve joined the CLE blog as guest speaker and will be liveblogging the conference at that blog and also here.  I’m a part-time professor at NLS, and a member of the CLE, which does fine research work in legal education.  The conference has speakers…

  • Simulated client, final session – ahead of whose curve?

    So where do we want to take the SCI from here?  That was a key question for us at the final session of the day.  It was observed that however successful the method might be demonstrated to be, there will be some staff and some students who simply will not want to engage.  That’s understandable…

  • Afterthoughts on Legal Education in Crisis

    So a massively busy two days.  I was planning to sneak off at some point to see U of Chicago’s Laboratory Schools, and pay a quiet visit to the Dewey’s legacies there (he’s been much in my mind, being here, and I reread the late Laurel N. Tanner’s fine account before I came over), but…

  • Legal Education Crisis? Workshop: Panel 3

    Day two, and first up, John Bliss, ‘Becoming lawyers: mapping professional identity formation in the US and China’.  John gave an absorbing account of the reasons why students become certain lawyers, using identity maps – circles, where placing of roles and what the roles were etc, were crucial to understanding identity. Eg relations, particularly familial…

  • SLS Conference, Legal Education, session 4 & final thoughts

    Final legal education session.We had a call-off at the last minute, so only two speakers.  First up, Melissa Hardy on her research into the third year of a three-year cohort study into the career intentions of law degree students in the context of current and proposed legal education and training reforms She started by describing her…

  • 50 years of assessment in legal education – liveblog

    Am liveblogging the conference as much as I can.  Julian and I up first, slides on the Slides tab.  Whirlwind tour of past & present on the theme of the title, ‘Of tails and dogs: Standards, standardisation and innovation in assessment’. First up, Craig Newbury-Jones and Nigel Firth, Plymouth U Law School, on ‘Digital assessment for…

  • 50 years of assessment in legal education

    This is a conference hosted by the Association of Law Teachers at the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, today, and part of their 50th anniversary celebrations (there’s a 50 Years of Legal Education conference later in the year), which are looking back as well as looking forward to the future(s) of legal education.  Maybe it’s…

  • Simulated Clients @ Chinese University of Hong Kong

    Been travelling recently, so not much posting.  To Hong Kong in early December, training Simulated Clients for the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, organised by Elsa Kelly.  Spent four intensive days on scenario and assessment standardisation, with 10 clients.  The sessions were attended by Matthew Cheung and Martin Doris.  Martin and I go…

  • Convergence and fragmentation

    I’m giving a paper today at Melbourne Law School, by kind invitation of Gary Cazalet, title ‘Convergence and fragmentation: legal research, informatics and legal education’.  Slides up on the Slides page above.  The paper is a version of draft chapter five of a book I’m writing, Genealogies of Legal Education (interim chapter titles in the…