 Translation, not imitation: what legal educators can learn from schools
Teaching is something of a family profession in our household. My dad was a primary school headteacher, my mum was a head of department and teacher in further education, and my sisters teach in primary and secondary education. You can probably imagine the scene around the dining-room table: conversations about lesson plans, reluctant learners, brilliant activities, difficult classes, and the occasional spirited disagreement about what counts as “good teaching” and who has it harder.
When I became a lecturer in 2017, I was surprised that teaching approaches commonly used in schools were sometimes viewed negatively in a university setting. Structured and participatory activities were described, not always approvingly, as “too PGCert”: too carefully designed, too heavily facilitated and, occasionally, too much fun to be considered sufficiently substantial. Perhaps this reflects how we imagine university teaching, with the lecturer as specialist, the student as adult, and the work as advanced and intellectually rigorous. Against that backdrop, an activity that looks playful, colourful, or highly structured is often dismissed before we consider what it is actually asking students to do.
Yet, to borrow a saying many of us first learned at primary school, we should not judge a book by its cover. A lesson involving movement, conversation, or a creatively designed task may look less serious than a lecture or traditional seminar discussion, but that does not mean the intellectual work beneath it is less demanding. An activity may require learners to research unfamiliar material, distinguish between competing ideas, identify what matters, communicate it clearly, respond to questions, and revise their understanding. Fun and substance are not opposites. An activity can be enjoyable precisely because students are actively engaged in a challenging process.
This deserves attention because many of the intellectual processes developed through school activities remain central to legal education. The Law Subject Benchmark Statement emphasises critical thinking, evaluation, problem-solving, and communication, while across the national curriculum learners are also asked to reason, compare, justify, and evaluate. The level, context and disciplinary demands are clearly different, but the processes themselves do not become irrelevant when a student enters university. The challenge is therefore to separate the purpose of an activity from the form in which it first appears.
Consider the “marketplace” activity used in school teaching. Groups research different parts of a topic and create a market stall from which they share what they have learned. Some students remain at the stall to explain their findings, while others visit the rest of the marketplace, gather information and return to teach it to their group. On the surface, the activity may appear informal, perhaps even theatrical, but beneath that surface students are researching, selecting, synthesising, explaining, questioning, and taking responsibility for one another’s learning.
Those processes have an obvious place in legal education, but the school activity cannot simply be copied and pasted into a law seminar. Transferred unchanged, even a valuable activity may feel patronising, artificial, or disconnected from the discipline. That is a legitimate concern, but it is an argument for thoughtful adaptation rather than for dismissing the approach altogether. The answer is not imitation, but translation.
Translation begins by asking three questions: what intellectual process sits beneath the activity, where does that process arise in legal learning, and how can the activity be redesigned for the students, subject, and level of study in front of us? The marketplace might, for example, become a client-interview carousel or a legal networking fair. Different groups could examine judgments, statutory provisions, or competing perspectives on a contested issue before deciding what others genuinely need to understand. Students moving between groups might be required not simply to collect information, but to identify tensions between authorities, record points of uncertainty, and return to their original group to construct a reasoned position or advise a client.
The translated activity would retain the research, synthesis, peer explanation, and shared responsibility of the original, while introducing the ambiguity, authority, and contestability that characterise legal reasoning. It might look very different from the school activity that inspired it, but that is not a weakness. What has been transferred is not the activity itself, but its underlying purpose.
The best dining-room-table conversations in my family are rarely about copying exactly what somebody else has done. They are about understanding what made an idea work, identifying what it enabled learners to do, and wondering what it might look like in another classroom. School teaching does not provide ready-made activities that can simply be imported into legal education. It offers something more valuable: an invitation to reconsider what intellectually rigorous teaching can look like.
Feature image: Photo by Dom Fou on Unsplash. Public domain.
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 Clinical Legal Education, Theory and Practice
Legal education, at least in the Anglosphere, has been undergoing a quiet but very recognisable transformation. The case study method, developed by Christopher Columbus Langdell at Harvard in the 1870s, is steadily giving way to ‘authentic’, ‘real life’ or ‘experiential’ learning, wherein theory and practice are intermeshed. Law is now often studied ‘in context’ (consequences, remedies, and enforcement are discussed); the gap between ‘law in theory’ and ‘law in action’ is investigated; and the ‘theory of the practice’ is incorporated into the curriculum.
Clinical legal education (CLE) takes this pedagogical approach to its logical conclusion. In CLE, law students learn through the practical application of law by providing legal services to the public and by reflecting on this experience to develop their understanding of law and legal theory. In light of the above, it is unsurprising that CLE has seen a rapid growth in the UK in the past decade. In addition to the aforementioned pedagogical shift, another driving force for this growth has been the hollowing out of public services by years of austerity politics, manifested in significant cuts in the provision of free legal services, both from the voluntary sector and from private law firms with legal contracts. These two factors combined to create a growing demand from the general public for free legal services and a growing demand from law students for some practical experience to form part of their law studies. This expansion in university law clinics has also seen a gradual move away from the law clinic inhabiting a small extra-curricular space populated by a handful of keen volunteers to larger, permanently staffed spaces where the clinic is incorporated into the curriculum, forming an assessed and credit bearing part of both undergraduate and postgraduate law programmes.
Clinical legal education is now very much a part of the twenty-first century legal education landscape, with an estimated 80% of law schools in the UK offering some form of provision. Against this background, it is somewhat surprising that there are very few textbooks available for students. It seems likely that one reason for this is that each university law clinic is unique in its offering and there is no common substantive law uniting them. A law clinic may provide advice services in one or more of the following: family law, housing, employment, criminal law, welfare benefits, special educational needs, small businesses, immigration and asylum, small claims disputes. Those services may be supervised by law school staff or by external agencies working in partnership. When you come to consider the incredible variety of models of delivery along with the range of legal topics needed, the lack of standard core textbooks becomes less surprising, as it is hard to imagine how one book might serve quite so many needs.
In addition to the incredible range of substantive law that can be found in university law clinics, the rationale for and underpinning values of law clinics are highly contested. Is the university law clinic a vehicle for developing deep critical thinking about values, power and justice in an unjust world, a vehicle for developing employability skills for budding lawyers, a way for law schools to help meet the legal needs of local communities, or can it be all of the above?
Undaunted by this landscape, we decided to rise to the challenge of creating a text that unites the theory and the practice of clinical legal education—and in doing so set out our own vision of what clinical legal education is and can be. We seek to champion a vision of clinical legal education that is radical and transformative for students and the communities they serve whilst also positioning ourselves on the side of promoting social justice through legal practice.
We explore the ways in which experiential learning can enrich the student experience, not only by developing key employability skills but also by creating a space in which theory can be applied and become meaningful.
Our proposition is that there are 6 features to clinical legal education:
- Active participation: this is the defining feature, and thus the foundation of clinical legal education. There is no room in a clinic for students to passively absorb knowledge handed to them by a lecturer. They are active participants in their own learning experience.
- Interaction in role: students play an active part in interviewing, advising, or otherwise working for a client by adopting a professional role.[CA3] By taking on such a role, students learn how to interact with others as they would in legal practice.
- The dynamic nature of the problem: in legal education, we often design neatly packaged problems for students that will draw out their knowledge and understanding of a particular point of law or practice. In clinical legal education, the problem cannot be packaged, and the solution may not be clear, which pushes the students to think creatively to apply their skills and knowledge.
- Part of a planned curriculum: this does not necessarily mean that the clinic needs to form part of an assessed programme, but to move from beyond experience to education, a clear learning goal needs to be identified for students and educators. Education requires theorising, extrapolating experiences, conceptualising and framing them, understanding them as part of a general structure, and trying again on the basis of that understanding.
- Reflection: learning how to reflect allows students to make sense of their experience and learn from that experience.
- Access to justice: this feature is present in many, but not all, clinics. Teaching students about access to justice is central to our own approaches to clinical education and is therefore also central to the book.
We live in very uncertain times, and our students come to us anxious about jobs and their futures. Many of our universities in the UK are located in cities and regions where poverty, inequality, and injustice are part of the everyday landscape. Law students are hoping to enter a world of work that is changing so fast that neither practicing lawyers nor legal academics have a clear picture of what that world will look like. It is tempting, therefore, for the legal academy to collectively put our heads down and carry on with what we have always done: give lectures, teach the black letter law, expect students to read books and judgments and sit exams at the end of the year. We hope that this book and our vision of law as a site of injustice as well as justice, clinics as a site of theory and practice, and legal practice as a form of communication and connection between people will serve to inspire and support new generations of law students and their teachers.
Featured image by Sasun Bughdaryan via Unsplash.
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 Built on trust: the rigorous review process behind Oxford Law Pro’s Content [infographic]
Legal professionals need content they can depend on—accuracy, authority, and integrity are non-negotiable. At Oxford University Press, every legal title included in Oxford Law Pro undergoes a thorough review process involving Acquisition Editors, expert peer reviewers, and final approval by OUP Delegates, trusted senior professors at the University of Oxford and other leading institutions. This infographic delves into the detail of the review process, demonstrating how OUP ensures that its legal publications meet the highest standards, earning the trust of practitioners and scholars around the globe.
Featured image via Getty Images.
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 How to be a good lawyer in an AI world
“AI is an amazing legal assistant that will cut out all the boring work and make you three times as efficient.”
“AI is a copyright thief that will take your work and reproduce it without attribution or remuneration.”
“AI produces great value for your clients.”
“AI gets things wrong and will make you a global laughing stock if you cite imaginary cases in your court pleadings.”
Sounds familiar? There is no shortage of opinions on generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) and its uses in the legal space. If you are a lawyer, it is probably dominating your office meetings and working dinner conversations. Many firms are taking a cautious approach but, with legal technology providers pouring hundreds of millions of pounds into developing ever faster, more accurate tools, it feels only a matter of time before the use of Gen AI is an integral part of most lawyers’ working days. That has interesting, if uncertain, implications for how young lawyers learn their craft and the kind of roles available to legal professionals, as well as for the delivery of justice.
There is something else that merits attention in the AI debate: what is the value of human thinking about the law? Law doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is shaped and applied in a social, political, and economic reality created by humans. It is a deeply human endeavour. How can the law evolve if algorithms use statistics to apply legislation and precedent to the facts and produce pleadings—or even decisions—based on the most probable outcome? What is the role of lawyers and judges if their work can be mined by a large language model (LLM), which can then create its own legal advice, pleadings, and judgments, as well as legal scholarship, for anyone who knows how to write the right prompts? What does it mean to be a good lawyer when AI can do your work in seconds—for free?
We are not quite in that world yet but it is not a far-fetched scenario. Numerous tests have shown that the differences between student- or AI-written essays can be imperceptible even to experienced lecturers. Some of the steps to be taken are deeply practical: establish the right guardrails to stop the sharing of protected information with LLMs that will ingest that information and reuse it; train lawyers and legal scholars on how to use AI responsibly and to always check the source material; and press tech companies to be transparent about how their LLMs are trained and users’ data and privacy are protected. Ensuring LLMs are free from bias is particularly important. No single lawyer can achieve this but, collectively, lawyers’ advocacy for responsible, safe AI will make a difference.
Perhaps even more important is this: among everything AI promises, let us not lose sight of the importance of human thinking and creativity to the law. Sometimes a completely new line of argument or a highly creative interpretation is required to adapt the law to changing circumstances or shifts in society. AI cannot, or perhaps should not, do this. The best thinking is often slow, maturing over time as a lawyer or judge mulls a case over. Or it emerges in conversations with others, sometimes in unexpected ways. It is often sparked by something you read. Legal publishing has a crucial role here: helping to disseminate the best legal analysis and commentary across the globe and create a permanent record of every book, article, and short form piece. Being a good lawyer in an AI world involves placing enduring value on the quality and originality of human thought and scholarship.
Featured image by Ground Picture and licensed via Shutterstock.
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 Community, commerce, and open access experimentation
You may have wondered why so many publishers are announcing pilot projects on open access (OA) publishing. The theme of Open Access Week (October 21-27), Community over Commercialization, hints at the reason: publishers want to engage with the community’s request for new models but can’t afford to make a loss on OA (and shouldn’t be expected to). So, the innovation challenge is taken up by means of pilots: experiments that can be reviewed and then either rejected, repeated, or adapted.
Two Innovative Pilots
This year OUP is trialling two different OA funding models. Up until now OUP’s gold OA publishing outside of journals has largely been funded by processing charges for individual books, paid for by research funders or individual institutions. The two new initiatives look to fund OA on a much larger scale via diamond OA models that OUP has adopted and refined:
- Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO): Commit to Open seeks funding from the academic library community for the OA publication of 30 participating books. While other publishers have launched similar initiatives, the novelty here is our aim for radical openness:
- the 30 titles are announced up front.
- we have no minimum commitment threshold for publishing a book under an OA licence.
- progress will be publicized monthly.
- Max Planck Encyclopedias of International Law, the market-leading international law resource published by OUP, will be among the first non-journal publications to adopt the Subscribe to Open model (S2O). A range of publishers have tried out S2O with journals, where current subscribers are asked to continue to pay each year so that existing content can be made free to all, and new content is published under an OA license. So long as a high enough proportion of existing subscribers renew, the paywall is removed for a year, and then the process repeats the following year.
For OUP, finding ways to expand our OA offering is a perfect fit with our mission. It helps us to seize the opportunity that digital distribution offers for the unlimited dissemination of scholarship. That said, we are also acutely aware that paid-for OA can present risks of lower quality thresholds, and that there is a perception that OA books in particular are in some sense lesser than non-OA books.
For that reason, each book in our Commit to Open program was carefully selected for this pilot. Each went through the same rigorous peer- and internal -review process and was slated for regular sale as part of OSO before being pulled into Commit to Open. All of them would fare very well as commercial projects but we are excited to bring these works to an even broader community of readers through the program, and we look forward to seeing how they contribute to this developing model. Another key community element of the initiative is the inclusion of authors and topics that still struggle to attract funding for OA publishing: a “Support New Voices” collection by authors who are within six years of their first academic appointment, and a Humanities collection.
In the case of the Encyclopedias, they are already the most trusted source in the field. The importance for the community here lies in the nature of the content. International law deals with highly topical issues of global justice and equality—knowledge of it has the potential to benefit students, scholars, civil society activists, and practitioners everywhere. To make such a trusted resource freely available to the whole world would represent a significant public good.
Sustainability
What determines whether a pilot becomes a program? As mentioned, we use pilots to answer questions of sustainability and replication. In the case of Commit to Open, it is very labour-intensive to do it the way we have chosen e.g. agreeing all of the titles upfront, and the manual processes needed to implement a novel funding model. If the pilot is successful, we will need to work out whether it is sustainable to carry it out again, whether to expand it, and what permanent systems need to be put in place to support the program.
With Subscribe to Open the challenge is a different one. Operationally it is simplicity itself—absolutely nothing changes other than that the paywall is removed, so long as renewals hold up. But therein lies the risk: the (understandable) temptation for some subscribers to wait and see and take advantage of free access.
But those are questions for further down the line. Our immediate concern is getting engagement from the community and hearing responses to these initiatives, something we are very much hoping to achieve in OA Week.
You can find out more about Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO): Commit to Open in our upcoming librarian webinar on Tuesday, November 26, 2024. Sign up here.
Featured image by Andrea Piacquadio via Pexels.
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