Category: simulation

  • Teaching ≈ Learning ≈ Regulation

    At the behest of Dr Paulina Wilson of QUB I recently wrote a short piece for the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly series called Reflections on Teaching. Around 5,000 words. Usually it takes me 5K to draw breath, so it was quite a challenge to reflect on 44 years in education, 34 of them in legal…

  • Simulated Client workshop summary

    The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson once observed that if you wish to understand a culture, study its nurseries. There is a similar principle for the understanding of professions: if you wish to understand why professions develop as they do, study their nurseries, in this case, their forms of professional preparation. When you do, you will generally…

  • Sim client workshop: programme and resources

    One of the initiatives I’ve been working on in the last 20 years is the Simulated Client Initiative. I’ve worked with a range of partners to establish SC projects internationally. I’ve also organised international workshops in London (Gray’s Inn), Canberra (ANU College of Law) and Toronto, which were liveblogged in this blog This month, people…

  • Redivivus

    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…

  • SC Workshop: Final plenary

    First, a word about the two sessions that weren’t recorded, namely the demo interview with Alexis Callen as lawyer and Dana Mohr as SC, and the panel: Alexis, Dana, Joan Rilling.  Alexis did exceptionally well as a 1L lawyer, and Dana was first rate at enacting the client, and then switching into feedback mode with…

  • Learning & teaching session @ Canadian Assoc for Legal Ethics (CALE) conference

    Am at Windsor Law School, on the Detroit River, attending the CALE annual conference on legal ethics.  I’m reporting on the education session which had with four presentations.  Leslie Walden (Ottawa) presented on ‘Incorporating Government Lawyers into Legal Ethics Teaching’.  Pooja Parmar (Victoria) gave us an interesting account of her students learning legal ethics at…

  • Sim Clients @ Osgoode

    We’ve organised student interviews with our Sim Clients (SCs) this academic year again in Osgoode Hall Law School.  As before, we ran the project in the JD 1L, but this time in the first, not the second, semester. And as before we ran the project in Legal Process (subject leader Shelley Margot Kierstead, with the…

  • Experiential Learning Conference, HKU Faculty of Law, day 2, am, session 1

    Second day of the conference, and we’re focusing first on technology and innovations in legal education, followed after the break by a session on experiential learning and innovation in professional education.  For reference, full conference programme here. We start with the third keynote, this time from Daniel Rodriguez from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, on…

  • CLEO Conference: Games, Stories and Simulations

    Am here in London South Bank University Law at the invitation of Emily Allbon, Dawn Watkins and Andy Unger, who are convening this one-day event.  CLEO is the Clinical Legal Education Organisation, but as the title suggests, the speakers are moving well beyond the usual framework of clinic. There will be Belbin role games and design…

  • Pressing problems MLR seminar, final thoughts

    The seminar organisers based the conference on a book of essays edited by Peter Birks entitled Pressing Problems in the Law. Vol 2. What are Law Schools For? and published by OUP in 1996 (hereafter, ‘Birks’). I remember buying it around 1997 or 1998, second-hand, from Voltaire & Rousseau, in Glasgow.  Five years out from…

  • New beginnings

    Tonight is the formal opening of Osgoode Professional Development’s (OPD) newly refurbished premises on floor 26 of 1 Dundas St West, downtown Toronto. Now the view inside will match the stunning views outside to Lake Ontario and the Toronto Islands, Algonquin Island, and all the way west and south to Mississauga, glimpsed through a foreground…

  • Osgoode Sim Client Project

    We’ve finished our Simulated Client (SC) project at Osgoode Hall Law School, which was around three months in the planning. Further and much more detailed analysis later, but this is a quick post for now to summarise what we did.