Centre for Legal Education

The annual CLE research seminar took place on 11^th February:

• Helen Hall: Imagination, Empathy and Narrative in Legal Education: Game Based Approaches.
• Joy Davies: What is learning? A brief exploration of the tension between the abstract practice of reflection in professional legal education and the very instrumental use of learning outcomes and assessment.
• Paulo Karat:  Are lawyers destined to suffer? Personality traits and conditioning as a mediating factor in burnout and mental illness (a preliminary review of the literature).

Natalie Braber, Jane Ching and Jane Jarman gave a research seminar on 5^th February on 'I’ve never met a barrister who sounds like me: accent bias at the Bar'.

On 20^th March, the centre hosted an Anglo-Dutch roundtable on AI in legal education.  Colleagues from the law school and elsewhere in NTU joined presenters from Open Universiteit, Tilburg University and Hasselt University in vigorous discussion about the challenges and opportunities presented by AI in our context.

The CLE’s annual research seminar took place on 11 July 2024 with the following papers:

• Jane Jarman & Peter Vaughan - "Just make it fair!”: Validity in Assessment – A review of the Professional Certificate in Trade Mark Practice"
• Julia Jennings - “Unveiling student potential through engagement with the Skills Audit - a lifelong iterative employability tool”
• Paulo Karat - "Working with reactivity: mindfulness-informed teaching possibilities in legal education"

Satisfying Stakeholders In Legal Education: How To Pack Everything In (Including The Kitchen Sink) – June 2024

Our sixth biennial international conference again took a partly online, partly face to face format. We were delighted to meet friends old and new, and many useful conversations took place that have positive implications for the future. We were delighted to hear from participants throughout the world as well as from a wide range of UK universities. Our keynote speaker, Professor Joshua Castellino, provided much food for thought in his presentation on The Role of the Law School in Times of More & More: Suggestions for Navigating Tough Terrain.

Papers were presented by:

• Simon Best, Leeds Trinity University, UK - COIL Insights: Tailoring Legal Education for Global Stakeholder Approval
• Lucinda Bromfield and Gillian Sproule, BPP University, UK - SQE: A challenge and an opportunity
• Mariia Domina, University of Lorraine, France - Why interdisciplinary research matters in law schools: a case study of financial markets law
• István Erdős, University of Debrecen, Hungary - How the international convergence of common law and civil law affects legal education?
• Olugbenga Damola Falade, University of Hull, UK - The Nigeria Teaching Experience: A Case for Practitioners’ Collaboration to Enhance the English Legal Education System
• Maaike Geuens, Tilburg University, The Netherlands - AI and legal education: back to the drawing board? A Case Study in Academic Writing
• Jane Jarman and Callum Scott, Nottingham Law School, UK - “A Profound Sense of Mystery?” Navigating Competing Tensions in Clinical Legal Education
• Kalyani Jayasekara, General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University, Sri Lanka - Regulatory requirements for the Legal Education in Sri Lanka
• Jenny Kemp, University of Leicester, UK - Addressing learner needs: how to help LLM students acquire discipline-specific vocabulary
• Geo Quinot, Stellenbosch University, South Africa - Transformational Legal Education 2.0
• Victor Reyes, healingjudges.com, USA - Thriving as a Human Being: Tools to Better Connect with Ourselves, Mitigate Secondary Trauma and Better Serve our Communities
• John Rumbold and Paulo Karat, Nottingham Law School, UK - The Application of Mindfulness in legal education
• Jennifer Spreng, Southern Illinois University Simmons Law School, USA - From Feedback Literacy to Evaluative Judgment: Satisfying Stakeholders with a Pedagogy that Improves Students’ Academic Performance, Professional Capacities, and American “NextGen” Bar Examination Readiness
• Fikayo Taiwo, Essex Law School, University of Essex, UK - Transitioning from Online/Blended Learning to In-Person Teaching after the Covid19 Pandemic: Assessing Impact on Student Engagement
• Sanya Yadav, Bennett University, India - Educational Design & Development with collaboration for developed and developing countries

A major event was the Global Legal Skills Conference, hosted at NLS over 31 July to 1 August.  Papers were presented by NLS colleagues:

• Liz Curran et al: Policy Clinics: Why and How?
• Mathew Game: Virtual Internship Model: Empowering Students with Drafting and Employability Skills
• Matthew Homewood et al: Developing Global Legal Research and Writing Skills Through a Unique UK-US Collaboration.
• Jane Jarman and Peter Vaughan: Practice Makes Perfect: An Integrated Approach to Drafting Witness Statements by Trainee Trade Mark Attorneys.
• Julia Jennings: The Skills Audit – A Globally Transferrable Employability Tool.
• Katie Smith: From Classroom to Courtroom: A Focus on Clinical Legal Education in a University Teaching Law Firm.

Our 2023 research seminars included

• Jane Ching and Azhin Omer: The motivations and experiences of international law students
• Helen Hall: Using Brave New World and escape rooms as a teaching tool.
• Pamela Henderson: Using storyboarding software as a support for undergraduate learning.

In addition:

• Joy Davies and colleagues held a very successful Negotiation and Mediation Week for students (31 May – 2 June).
• Azhin Omer and Jane Ching hosted their SLS-funded dissemination event on the Motivation and Experiences of International Law Students on 9^th June 2023.  Special credit should be given to NLS LLM students Jamiu Akinpelu, Harrison Ononiwu, Osamwonyi Odiase  and Oluwatomilola Oyewusi-Muraina for their participation in a closing student panel.

Community, Creativity and Culture in Legal Education – June 2022

It is probably fair to say that, after the years of lockdown and restrictions on travel and face to face meeting, we thought long and hard about how best to configure our 2022 biennial conference.  In the circumstances, we wanted to focus on the positives of creativity and on bringing colleagues and students together in community. Knowing that travel, and the costs of travel, remain impractical for many people, we wanted to benefit from the model of online session stripped across a week that we had adopted, perforce, in 2020, we decided to use that again.  However we also wanted to bring people together and to celebrate community.  With the generous support of the law school, we were able to do that too!  As ever the organising committee, session chairs and colleagues in supporting departments at NTU pulled out all the stops.

We were delighted to have students both attend and deliver some of the papers.  We were also delighted about the extent of participation from jurisdictions outside the UK, particularly in India.  And we had a tremendous opening session from our inspiring keynote speaker, Foluke Adebisi as well as food for final thought in John Hodgson’s reflections on his lifetime in legal education.  A special edition of the Nottingham Law Journal contained material drawn from this conference.

Foluke Adebisi, The future of law (and legal education) in an unequal and imperilled world  

Gábor Andrási, What is your law school’s level of maturity regarding the integration of social responsibility into the organisation?

Nandini Boodia- Canoo, Centring Humanity in Legal Education – a classroom experience

Shrshtee Choudhary, Aditi Paul, Ruchika Sharma, Legislation and Jurisdiction of Suicide Laws in India: Conflicts and Retrospective Analysis

Liz Curran, Good Practice in Legal Education for the Community and Multidisciplinary Practice

Hazel Dawe, Building learning communities as a means of helping students cope with the transition from school to university

Graham Ferris, Is law as an academic discipline still an important factor in the identity of legal academics and undergraduate students in the neo-liberal university?,

Emma Flint, Law School in 2022: killer of creativity or crucible of community and culture?

Mathew Game, Peter Vaughan and James Ball Moving a Regulated Teaching Law Firm Online; Engaging and Supervising Students in an Online World

John Hodgson, Closing remarks: reflections on 35 years in legal education

Alina Hruba Legal Education in Nordic Countries: comparative approach

Laura Hughes-Gerber, Noel McGuirk, Rafael Savva, Augmenting student experience through embedding holistic student support provision for Law students into a changing curricular framework

Stephen Idowu Ilesanmi, Multidisciplinary legal education in Nigerian built environment

Jane Jarman and Callum Scott, Say my name:   The formation of professional identity as a solicitor – lessons from the SRA Equivalent Means arrangements.

Jenny Kemp, The vocabulary LLM International Law students really need_

Sona Kumar, Auxiliary Sciences and Legal Education

Yingxiang Long, Cultivating Innovative Private Lawmakers in the Global Context—from the Perspective of China

Luke Lynch, Perverting the course of [social] justice: How can we make access to legal work experience and mentoring more equitable?1

Gerard Maguire and Noelle Higgins, Maximising the PhD Supervision Experience: Two Sides of the Story

Sugandha Passi, Technology and Artificial Intelligence in Indian Legal Education

Our 2022 research seminars included:

• Siân Hughes, Experiences of using H5P to deliver content to students
• Pamela Henderson, Meet the Halsburys: using digital tools to enhance the visual appeal of undergraduate law
• Jane Ching Studying here, but working there: the trade in legal professional qualifications.

In addition,

• Joy Davies led a seminar on Designing and delivering experiential learning, role play and simulation with colleagues at Prince Ibn Fahd university, Saudi Arabia
• Visiting Professor Pat Leighton gave a research seminar on If we want societal improvement and risk reduction, is our current regulatory framework fit for purpose? What's the evidence?

Our 2021 research seminars included:

• Jane Ching, Responsibility rights and capability as an integrating value: from practice validity to valid practice
• James Thornton and Jo Baggaley Using pre-seminar online quizzes to improve student preparation, learning and engagement

With the Centre for Rights and Justice, we co-hosted Engaging Futures: A Workshop on Turning Academic Ideas into Games.  This interactive session focused on how analogue games can bring research and academic ideas to wider audiences, both for teaching and dissemination purposes.  Led led by Ellie Dix (educator and owner of The Dark Imp Games) it provided participants with an opportunity to design their own board game within 90 minutes.

Impact and Wellbeing – June 2020

Our 2020 conference was long in the planning, and we were devastated in the spring of 2020 when it became obvious that a face to face event was not going to be possible.  By then, however, we had gathered together a fascinating group of papers and participants from around the world.  So, with the support of the school and our supporters, we reconvened on a more intimate basis, with papers delivered in shorter morning and afternoon sessions across the week of 22nd to 26th June 2020.  Despite the challenges, discussion was vigorous and ongoing links have been made.

Opening and closing remarks were given by Associate Professor Graham Ferris and Associate Professor Jane Jarman, and an inspiring keynote on Measuring Impact through Research into Access to Justice Service Delivery and Legal Education Initiatives was delivered by Dr Liz Curran of Australian National University.

UK participants came from Nottingham Law School and from NTU’s School of Social Sciences as well as Birmingham, Hertfordshire, Leeds, OU and Sheffield. International participants – often braving differences in time zones to join us – represented Australia, Egypt, Hungary, India, Jamaica, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the USA.  Our group included people at all stages of their careers, and with interests in both academic and vocational education.  A special edition of the Journal of Rights and Justice includes material drawn from this conference.

It was clear that both impact and wellbeing are concerns across the globe in legal education, and that people are pushing forward in their practice in both making and measuring impact and in incorporating wellbeing into the curriculum and communal life of law schools.  The challenges vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but the drive to improve is shared, as is an urgent concern with the consequences of heavier reliance upon information technology for educational delivery.

Impact is of course a quality assessed in the UK’s REF, but as was clear from Liz Curran’s keynote that it is far more.  It is an aspiration, and can best be both achieved and measured if research is collaborative, engaging with community research partners from the stage of design, through the research investigation and beyond into the qualitative and quantitative assessment of the effects of the research.  There is impact inside and outside the academy and impact through research and through legal education.

The impact of legal education is where the role of impact and the role of welling connect.  Incorporating a concern with wellbeing in the curriculum, whether through attention to “soft skills” or collaborative inquiry, or experiential learning, or through building relationships was one theme.  A second was incorporation of what is known about activities and attitudes and wellbeing into legal education which has sometimes been characterised by an unhealthy individual competitiveness and instrumentalism. However, it was recognised that many of the pressures facing our students are generated outside the academy.

Thus, the concern with wellbeing joined once more the concern with impact both inside and, crucially, outside the academy. As legal educators we are preparing our students for a life beyond the university.  As legal researchers, we are trying to make sure that world is one that is fit to receive them.

Taher Abouleid: The Impact of Legal Education on the Legal Profession in Egypt

Gábor Andrási: Expected but not taught? Teaching management at law schools in Hungary and the U.S.

Peter Benbow and Richard Machin: Promoting wellbeing through social work legal education

Jane Ching: Aligning the agenda, the investigatory model and the impact in legal education reviews

Liz Curran (Keynote): Measuring Impact through Research into Access to Justice Service Delivery and Legal Education Initiatives

Carol Edwards and Liz Hardie: The Challenges and Rewards of Setting up a Mentoring Programme in the Virtual Environment

Graham Ferris: Does legal education build or degrade resilience?

Neal Geach and Claudia Carr: The Wellbeing of University Law Students and Staff

Hossam Hassan: The Role of Legal Clinics in Legal Education’s Development in Egypt: the model from Mansoura Law School

Emma Jones: Commonalities and commodities: Reflections on developing a wellbeing resource for legal professionals

Rachael O’Connor: Lawyer Identity and Personal Wellbeing

Geo Quinot: Legal Education in Community: collaborative legal education, an ethic and pedagogy of care and Ubuntu

M.S. Sharmila: Towards an Integrated Legal Education: a conscious way of strengthening the well being of lawyers and law students in India 

Helena Stoop: The use of Blended Learning to Support Student Wellness: experiences teaching Company Law at the University of Cape Town

Our 2019 research seminars included

• John Hodgson, Observations on the SQE1 pilot
• Kate Mills, Factors influencing LPC students’ seminar attendance
• Joy Davies and Jane Ching, Learning Through Practice: What? So What? Now What?

In addition:

• Graham Ferris, together with colleagues at Emory University in the USA hosted A Workshop on Vulnerability and the Organisation of Academic Labour. As well as participants from Emory (including Professor Martha Fineman), and from NTU, this event attracted participants from Algeria, Brazil, Canada and elsewhere in the UK.
• Dawn Sedman,  Women and International Law. This was a joint event organised by Dawn and supported by both the CLE and the CRJ intended as part of the beginning of an initiative looking at women's representation, agency and participation in international law
• Graham Ferris and Pamela Henderson co-hosted Northumbria University’s Legal Education and Professional Skills (LEAPS) Research Group, Nottingham Law School’s Centre for Legal Education (CLE), Revisiting “Pressing Problems in the Law: What is the Law School for?” 20 years on, funded by the Modern Law Review

Our 2018 research seminars included:

• Visiting Senior Fellow Alison Bone on assessment
• Elyse Wakelin on pastoral care
• Jane Ching proposing a taxonomy of legal education reviews
• Paul Maharg on Problem-Based Learning in Legal Learning: How Can the Digital Domain Be Developed?

In addition,

• Graham Ferris held a session in the Health and Wellbeing stream and supported by LERN attended by external participants on Investigations into Law Student and Lawyer Wellbeing
• Visiting Senior Fellow Liz Curran facilitated a series of events attended by external participants:
  • Building collaborations locally - Applying a health justice partnerships model to law clinics.  
  • Alternative ways to approach legal problem solving and disputes to the adversarial process to seek justice.  
  • New approaches to lawyering and the implications for legal education: equipping our students to meet the changing world.

Legal Education, Legal Practice and Technology – June 2017

We are delighted with the success of our third academic conference, held on 16-17 June 2017. Focused around the concept of “technology”, participants were invited to be creative, and many were extremely innovative, including demonstrations and participation by videoconference from the other side of the globe. In addition, friendships and links were forged, in sessions and in more informal activities, including tweets containing our hashtag that were seen 73,925 times by 36,173 different people.  We were also delighted with the number of current students who participated, from NLS, Cambridge, Open University, York University and Hidayatullah National Law University in India.  Special thanks go to our NLS student hosts Ciara Higgins and Isbah Mehraj.

The conference also represented our fifth anniversary as a research centre, so we can be forgiven for indulging ourselves a little with truly wondrous cupcakes (and Prosecco).  We also enjoyed highly stimulating keynote sessions with Brian Inkster, Ludwig Bull (lawbot and Dennix), Paul Maharg from NLS and Osgoode Hall, and Craig Newbery-Jones from Plymouth University Law School.

Participants came from Canada, China, Egypt, Germany, Hungary, India, Libya, South Africa, the UK and USA. A special edition of the Nottingham Law Journal includes material drawn from our 2015 and 2017 conferences.

Papers, posters and presentations were given by the following:

Taher Abouleid : Legal Education and technology in Egypt in an era of Globalization

Arpit Agarwahl: Technology and Legal Practice, a revolutionary nexis

Hamida Ali Aljaridi: Technology in Legal Education (Poster)

Emily Allbon and Morris Pamplin: Lagton Legal: Creating a Transmedia Storyworld for the LLB Legal Practice

Gábor Andrási: Should Hungarian Legal Ethics Education Invest In Technology?

Ludwig Bull: Technology Makes You A Better Lawyer, not a Techie

Neetu Chetty: Teaching Law to a digital generation

Lisa Davies: Law PORT: an online training initiative to improve the legal information literacy skills of PhD researchers across the UK

Janice Denoncourt: Interdisciplinary Legal Education:  Embedding Intellectual Property Law in Business Programmes

Pamela Henderson: Implementing SCALE-UP in undergraduate Law

Matthew J Homewood: Extending learning spaces using social media

Nigel Hudson: PropertyMon Go!: Gotta catch ‘em all!!

Nigel Hudson and Paul Maharg: Legal Hack: how can we promote digital skills amongst law students?

Brian Inkster, Inksters solicitors, Clicks and Bricks: Legal IT the Inksters way

Emma Jones and colleagues: Exploring virtual reality in legal education

Jenny Kemp: Supporting international LLM students with the aid of corpus linguistic technologies

Raj Kumar: Online Legal Information System in Indian Environment: A Road Map to Provide Free Access to Legal Information Resources

Paul Maharg: ‘We are the campus’: learning design and ANU’s online PBL JD

Paul Maharg, Reflections

Craig Newbery-Jones, Plymouth University Law School: “The Courage to Walk into the Darkness, but Strength to Return to the Light” Technological Experimentation within Legal Education and Legal Practice

Linden Thomas: Developing a law school clinic case management system: an opportunity for collaboration?

Clare Weaver and colleagues: Teaching with Technology, Attitudes, Challenges and expectations

In 2017/2018 the Centre inaugurated its annual research seminar series.  This included

• Nigel Hudson on Simulated Clients - How the experiences of medical professional education can help the development of young legal professionals
• Nick Johnson on the law clinic as a legal laboratory.
• John Hodgson reporting back on research into how external examiners operate in the discipline of law.
• Nigel Hudson and Queenie Lai, visiting from Chinese University of Hong Kong, on standardised clients
• Paul Maharg onSRA SQE End-of-the-Law-School?
• Graham Ferris and Janette Thompson BTEC as an example of the pedagogic problem of the initial state of the learner.
• Visiting scholar Josh Krook, Is the problem question a problem?
• Zuri Djan, International students and the BPTC

Access to Justice and Legal Education – June 2015
We are delighted with the success of our second academic conference, informally known as CLE15 held on 19-21 June 2015. Focused around the concept of “access to justice”, participants were invited to be creative, and many were extremely innovative, including drama, interactive workshopping, and participation by videoconference from the other side of the globe. In addition, friendships and links were forged, in sessions and in more informal activities (which included a dinner at the ground of the world-famous Nottingham Forest soccer club).

Keynote sessions anchored and challenged the audience, including sessions by Amerdeep Somal, NLS alumna and last year’s Nottingham Trent University Alumna of the Year; Professor Janine Griffiths-Baker; Simao Paxi-Cato of Invictus Chambers and Young Legal Aid Lawyers and Professor Ron Staudt from Chicago on innovative ways in which US law students have worked to provide legal resources and templates for use by the public. Professor Pat Leighton of the Legal Education Research Network provided rousing closing comments encouraging participants to follow up their innovations and ideas by exposing them to rigorous research and critique.

Participants came from Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Fiji, Hungary, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Turkey, the UK and USA.  A special edition of the Nottingham Law Journal includes material drawn from our 2015 and 2017 conferences.

Talha Abdul Rahman (Advocate, Supreme Court of India) Language of Law and Access to Justice;  Árpád Gyuris (PhD candidate, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary) consumer rights and access to justice

Papers, posters and presentations were given by the following:

Deborah Ankor (Flinders University Australia): Developing holistic professional identity through clinical legal education 1  2

Jo Ann Boylan-Kemp and Pamela Henderson,  (Nottingham Law School, UK): Developing oral skills in undergraduate students to enhance access to justice

Graeme Broadbent (Kingston Law School, UK): Do we need a professor for the public understanding of law?

Jane Ching (Nottingham Law School, UK) and Michele M Leering (Executive Director/Lawyer, Community Advocacy and Legal Centre, Canada): Justice for all: reflective practice and reflective learning

Liz Curran (Australian National University, Australia): Access to justice – making it come alive and a reality for students and enabling engaged future practitioners

Sameena Dalwai (Jindal Global Law School, India): Caste in Law Schools?

Nigel Duncan (City University, UK) and Sally Hughes: Experiential learning in preparing lawyers to encounter corruption

Graham Ferris (Nottingham Law School, UK): Can provision of Legal Services and Legal Education Conflict When Serving the Ideal of Access to Justice?

Kılınç Ayşe and Akkuş Ezgi Fulya (Afyon Kocatepe University Faculty of Law, Turkey): the role of legal clinics in access to justice in Turkish legal education

Jenny Gibbons (University of York Law School, UK): Ethics in action: Two problem-based learning workshop sessions demonstrating the innovative way legal education can be delivered to enhance student’s consideration of access to justice issues

Yves Goguen (Doctorate in Civil Law (Candidate), Faculty of Law, McGill University , Canada) The Role of Legal Education in the Professional Socialization Process: Whose Responsibility is Public Interest Training, Anyways?

Jane Harries (Director, TNA Training, UK): Training for All

Liz Heffernan (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland): Building a Foundation for Access to Justice: Unlocking the First Year Curriculum

John Hodgson (Nottingham Law School, UK):  What is a solicitor?

Henry Holderness and Chris Gallavin (School of Law, University of Canterbury, New Zealand): Treating the Causes instead of the Symptoms: Establishing Law Reform Clinics as integral parts of university-based law clinic programmes

Jenny Holloway, Nick Johnson and Jane Jarman (Nottingham Law School, UK): Creation of a University Teaching Law Firm through the Alternative Business Structure Model – Farsighted or Foolhardy?

Becky Huxley-Binns (University of Law, UK): “A threshold concept of undergraduate law and ethics?”

Jane Jarman (Nottingham Law School, UK): From Agent to Attorney: A niche profession and a trajectory for access for specialist justice

Nick Johnson and Janice Denoncourt (Nottingham Law School, UK); The Nottingham Creative Intellectual Property Project

Jeffrey Kennedy (Doctorate in Civil Law (Candidate), Faculty of Law, McGill University, Canada): The View from Atop the Hill: Spatial Education, Transsystemia and ‘the Space Between’

Veronica Lachkovic (City University, UK): Training law students to be McKenzie friends for victims of domestic abuse

Paul Maharg (Nottingham Law School, UK/ Australian National University, Australia): Well-being and learning: what legal educators and regulators can learn from progressive primary education.

David Ong (Nottingham Law School, UK): Integrating Access to Environmental Justice within the University Law School Curriculum in England

Jennifer E Spreng (Arizona Summit Law School, USA): Suppose the class began the day the case walked in the door 1  2

Ronald W Staudt (Chicago-Kent College of Law, USA): Access to Justice Technology and the Role of Legal Education 1 2

Lynn Su (New York Law School, USA): Access to Justice for Crime Victims, the Accused and the Community: Teaching Law Students about the Role of the Prosecutor in Advancing Social Justice

LETR Review

On Wednesday 30 October 2013, academics from across the higher legal education sector came together to discuss the Legal Education Training Review Research phase recommendations. The Director of the CLE Professor Jane Ching (and previous Co-Director Rebecca Huxley-Binns) were invited panellists on a debate about the report.

Drama and the Law Lecturer

Law lecturers can increase their self-confidence when delivering lectures by adopting acting techniques and dramatic methods. This session explored different techniques to enhance self confidence in large group teaching sessions.

Association of Law Teachers (ALT) 48th Annual Conference

The 48th ALT Annual Conference, hosted by NTU, took place at Nottingham Conference Centre on 24 – 26 March 2013.

Launch of the Centre for Legal Education May 2012

The Centre for Legal Education was successfully launched on 3 May 2012 with a lively Legal Education Debate and a stimulating forum with the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) research team. The event attracted legal practitioners from across the country and the Centre was formally opened by Baroness Ruth Deech, chair of the Bar Standards Board.
Our Question-Time style debate, entitled Visions of Legal Education generated a lot of discussion on Twitter and blog posts from academics and practitioners from universities across the UK.

Fishing for Values in Legal Education

Nottingham Law School hosted a workshop as part of the Teaching Legal Ethics – UK programme of workshops on November 24 2012. This interactive workshop focussed on ethics in the undergraduate curriculum and was titled:
Fishing for Values in Legal Education: why should I want to introduce ethics into the LLB – and what does ethics mean in this context?

Embedding Sustainability into the Undergraduate Law Curriculum

Nottingham Law School hosted a workshop on Embedding Sustainability into the Undergraduate Law Curriculum on Tuesday 11 December 2012. Adopting a very broad definition of sustainability, including social, economic and environmental, this workshop supported discussion about embedding sustainability-related issues into the law degree.

The Centre for Legal Education enjoys the support of an International Advisory Committee (“IAC”) of senior legal academics and practitioners from around the world. The IAC liaise with and advise the Centre as well as share in the mutual benefits arising from an international specialist network.  We hope to continue to develop this committee and to facilitate links between those committed to legal education across the world.

The members of the committee are:

Taher Aboueleid (Egypt)

Taher is a judge of the Cairo Court of Appeal.  His interests include:

• As the founder of the legal education reform initiative in Egypt, raising awareness of the importance of reform by publications, workshops and through social media
• Designing and delivering innovative, high quality, research-informed teaching activities and materials
• A plan to develop a legal education reform initiative in Arab states.

Bernhard Bergmans (Germany)

Bernhard’s interests include:

• Systematization of legal education by working out different profiles of lawyers (resp. market needs) and an optimized system of diverse legal education models
• Understanding of the essence of legal learning by using input from different sources (legal methodology, psychology, neuroscience, pedagogy, philosophy)
• Values in legal education

Kim Economides (Australia)

Kim’s interests focus on the role of law schools in laying foundations of professionalism, primarily through introducing law teachers and students to ethical perspectives on the changing nature of legal work. He has served on legal education committees and worked in law schools in the UK, New Zealand and Australia.  He was a founder member of the International Legal Ethics Conference. Kim currently is working on a new Global Access to Justice Project (Regional Co-ordinator for Oceania, and Thematic Co-ordinator for Professional Legal Ethics and Anthropological/Postcolonial approaches that learn from First Nations Peoples).

John Flood (Australia)

John Flood is Professor of Law and Society at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, where he established the Law Futures research centre. He has previously held chairs in the UK and Ireland as well as visiting positions in the US, Germany and the UK. His research focuses on the legal profession–its structure, social world, regulation, education and globalization. His latest studies are looking at the role of technology in changing how law is done and how professional roles are adapting, or not.  John can be followed at https://johnflood.blogspot.com and on twitter @johnaflood.

Ernesto Riffo (Chile)

Ernesto’s interests focus on the challenges to the development of professional competencies within the context of the traditional curricular structure and teaching methodologies common in law schools in civil law systems. Since 2014 he heads the committee in charge of curriculum redesign at the Law School of the Silva Henríquez Catholic University, where he teaches legal theory and legal methodology.

Paul Wood KC (Canada)

Paul is a lawyer and legal educator and former Executive Director, Legal Education Society of Alberta. The Legal Education Society of Alberta provides mandatory bar admission training and continuing professional development to students, lawyers and law firm staff in the province of Alberta, Canada. Paul was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2012.

Paul has strong personal interests in lawyer competencies, the assessment of competencies, and experiential learning supporting the development and enhancement of lawyer competence.

We are delighted to work with our Visiting Professor Pat Leighton.