Category: Uncategorized

  • BILETA 2021 Conference

    The BILETA 2021 Conference will be kicking off next week – 0915 BST Wed 14 April – 1800 BST Friday 16 April.  I’ve been organising this year’s online conference on behalf of Newcastle University Law School with the assistance of my super virtual assistant Kirsty Melvin.  We have over 80 papers, two plenaries, two paper…

  • Publisher greed in the pandemic – the clusterbùrach #UCMIU

    Readers of this blog will be aware of my interest in the long-term predatory practices of academic journal publishers – see here and here.  Back in November 2018 my fellow editors Catherine Easton (general editor, EJCLI) and Abhilash Nair (editor-in-chief, EJLT) and I in November 2018 published a post summarising our article in the EJLT on the…

  • Final thoughts on LSBU & HKU conferences: curriculum, system, transfiguration

    These two conferences, within a week of each other, presented a number of interesting contrasts.  The LSBU event focused on sims and games and consisting of keynotes short sessions and a core games & sim design session, was the more interactive; the HKU conference, more generally on experiential learning and innovation, was more conventional.  I…

  • Some late arrivals from the last session…

    If you were following my summaries of the last session, you’ll note the lack of slides.  Problems importing; I thought the photos had got corrupted, gone awol, but no sooner had I pressed send on the post than some of them wandered back into my Imports.  I love technology. Anywhere here are some reminders of…

  • Experiential Learning Conference, HKU Faculty of Law, day 1, pm

    First session after lunch is a continuation of the theme of clinic.  First up, Kathleen Laverty, Director of Strathclyde Law Clinic, Strathclyde Law School, Glasgow.  They don’t have an aim to educate students – not that that isn’t important, but social justice is the first aim and education flows from that.  So the Social Justice…

  • 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…

  • Final sessions

    Third plenary session was my own: ‘”Complicitous and contestatory”: the hermeneutics of legal education’. Slides up at the usual places – Slideshare and the Slides tab above. The final session was a panel session where Margaret, Steven and I fielded questions from the audience about legal education’s future, technology, including which questions will remain for…

  • Pressing Problems, second parallel session

    Caroline Gibby first, on ‘SQEixt: where do we go from here? The careful roar from the North’. Caroline asked what’s good, what’s bad about the SQE. There is a lot of confusion about SQE 1. There’s inconsistency regarding the Bar’s approach to it. Management often doesn’t understand the issues that are often quite complex; and…

  • Pressing Problems, second plenary

    We now have Steven Vaughan from the Faculty of Laws, UCL, on ‘The lies we tell ourselves: Problematising the (S)hallow foundations of the core of legal education’. First up is the trot through the QLD, then on data from a project Steven has been working on. Steven started by querying the reasons for the five…

  • Pressing problems, parallel paper session 1

    First up, Geoffrey Samuels on ‘What can law schools offer other disciplines?’ He gave an interesting summary of what since the glossators and commentators law offered to other disciplines in the early universities. Such a pleasure to hear the achievements of early jurists praised in this way – I wrote on this in Transforming Legal…

  • Revisiting ‘Pressing Problems in the Law: What is the Law School for?’ 20 years on.

    Am back in Northumbria Law School for this event organised by Northumbria School of Law and Nottingham Law School, funded by the Modern Law Review. Was late because I thought I knew my way round Newcastle – so like Glasgow in so many ways – but stopped to re-orient (sea is on the wrong side,…

  • 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…