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Contrary to conventional narratives about legal education, Aspiration and Reality in Legal Education reveals a widespread desire among law teachers to integrate both theory and practice into the education of versatile and civic-minded lawyers. Despite this stated desire, however, this aspiration is largely unrealized due to a host of intellectual and institutional factors that produce a profound gap between what professors believe about law and the ideas they communicate through their teaching. Drawing on interviews with over sixty law professors in Canada, David Sandomierski makes two important empirical discoveries in this book. First, he establishes that, contrary to a dominant narrative in legal education that conceives of theory and practice as oppositional, the vast majority of law professors consider theory to be vitally important in preparing "better lawyers." Second, he uncovers a significant gap between the realist theoretical commitments held by a majority of professors and the formalist theories they almost uniformly convey through their teaching and conceptions of legal reasoning. Understanding the intellectual and institutional factors that account for these tensions, Sandomierski argues, is essential for any meaningful project of legal education reform.
A critical history of the Americanization of legal education in fourteen countries The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the export of American power—both hard and soft—throughout the world. What role did US cultural and economic imperialism play in legal education? American Legal Education Abroad offers an unprecedented and surprising picture of the history of legal education in fourteen countries beyond the United States. Each study in this book represents a critical history of the Americanization of legal education, reexamining prevailing narratives of exportation, transplantation, and imperialism. Collectively, these studies challenge the conventional wisdom that American ideas and practices have dominated globally. Editors Susan Bartie and David Sandomierski and their contributors suggest that to understand legal education and to respond thoughtfully to the mounting present-day challenges, it is essential to look beyond a particular region and consider not only the ideas behind legal education but also the broader historical, political, and cultural factors that have shaped them. American Legal Education Abroad begins with an important foundational history by leading Harvard Law School historian Bruce Kimball, who explains the factors that created a transportable American legal model, and the book concludes with reflections from two prominent American law professors, Susan Carle and Bob Gordon, whose observations on recent disruptions within US law schools suggest that their influence within the global order of legal education may soon fall into further decline. This book should be considered an invaluable resource for anyone in the field of law.
Thinking About Clinical Legal Education provides a range of philosophical and theoretical frameworks that can serve to enrich the teaching and practice of Clinical Legal Education (CLE). CLE has become an increasingly common feature of the curriculum in law schools across the globe. However, there has been relatively little attention paid to the theoretical and philosophical dimensions of this approach. This edited collection seeks to address this gap by bringing together contributions from the clinical community, to analyse their CLE practice using the framework of a clearly articulated philosophical or theoretical approach. Contributions include insights from a range of jurisdictions including: Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Ethiopia, Israel, Spain, UK and the US. This book will be of interest to CLE academics and clinic supervisors, practitioners, and students.
There is a myth that lingers around legal education in many democracies. That myth would have us believe that law students are admitted and then succeed based on raw merit, and that law schools are neutral settings in which professors (also selected and promoted based on merit) use their expertise to train those students to become lawyers. Based on original, empirical research, this book investigates this myth from myriad perspectives, diverse settings, and in different nations, revealing that hierarchies of power and cultural norms shape and maintain inequities in legal education. Embedded within law school cultures are assumptions that also stymie efforts at reform. The book examines hidden pedagogical messages, showing how presumptions about theory’s relation to practice are refracted through the obfuscating lens of curricula. The contributors also tackle questions of class and market as they affect law training. Finally, this collection examines how structural barriers replicate injustice even within institutions representing themselves as democratic and open, revealing common dynamics across cultural and institutional forms. The chapters speak to similar issues and to one another about the influence of context, images of law and lawyers, the political economy of legal education, and the agency of students and faculty.
As the leading legal historian of his generation in Canada and professor at McGill University for over three decades, Blaine Baker (1952–2018) was known for his unique personality, teaching style, intellectual cosmopolitanism, and deep commitment to the place of Canadian legal history in the curriculum of law faculties. Law, Life, and the Teaching of Legal History examines important themes in Canadian legal history through the prism of Baker’s career. Essays discuss Baker’s own research, his influence within McGill’s law faculty, his complex personality, and the relationship between the private and the public in the life of a university intellectual at the turn of the twenty-first century. Inspired by topics Baker took up in his own writing, contributors use Baker’s broad interests in legal culture to reflect on fundamental themes across Canadian legal history, including legal education, gender and race, technology, nation building and national identity, criminal law and marginalized populations, and constitutionalism. Law, Life, and the Teaching of Legal History offers a contemporary analysis of Canadian legal history and thoughtfully engages with what it means to honour one individual’s enduring legacy in the study of law.
Beverley McLachlin was the first woman to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. Joining the Court while it was establishing its approach to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, McLachlin aided the court in weathering the public backlash against controversial decisions during her tenure. Controversies in the Common Law explores Chief Justice McLachlin’s approach to legal reasoning, examines her remarkable contributions in controversial areas of the common law, and highlights the role of judicial philosophy in shaping the law. Chapters in this book span thirty years, and deal with a variety of topics – including tort, unjust enrichment, administrative and criminal law. The contributors show that McLachlin had a philosophical streak that drove her to ensure unity and consistency in the common law, and to prefer incremental change over revolution. Celebrating the career of an influential jurist, Controversies in the Common Law demonstrates how the common law approach taken by Chief Justice McLachlin has been successful in managing criticism and ensuring the legitimacy of the Court.
This book provides a counter-balance to the traditional focus on judicial decisions by exploring the contribution of legal scholars to the development of private law. In the book the work of a selection of leading scholars of contract law from across the common law world, ranging from Sir Jeffrey Gilbert (1674–1726) to Professor Brian Coote (1929–2019), is addressed by legal historians and current scholars in the field. The focus is on the nature of the work produced by the scholars in question, important influences on their work, and the impact which that work in turn had on thinking about contract law. The book also includes an introductory chapter and an afterword by Professor William Twining that explore connections between the scholars and recurrent themes. The process of subjecting contract law scholarship to sustained analysis provides new insights into the intellectual development of contract law and reveals the central role played by scholars in that process. And by focusing attention on the work of influential contract scholars, the book serves to emphasise the importance of legal scholarship to the development of the common law more generally.
For graduate lawyers to succeed in a global environment, legal education in every system must undergo revolutionary change. Professors van Caenegem and Hiscock explore in detail the new initiatives that are emerging as a response to this development an
Clinical legal education has revolutionized legal education, from its deepest origins in the nineteenth century to its now-global reach.
Law's Ethical, Global and Theoretical Contexts examines William Twining's principal contributions to law and jurisprudence in the context of three issues which will receive significant scholarly attention over the coming decades. Part I explores human rights, including torture, the role of evidence in human rights cases, the emerging discourse on 'traditional values', the relevance of 'Southern voices' to human rights debates, and the relationship between human rights and peace agreements. Part II assesses the impact of globalization through the lenses of sociology and comparative constitutionalism, and features an analysis of the development of pluralistic ideas of law in the context of privatization. Finally, Part III addresses issues of legal theory, including whether global legal pluralism needs a concept of law, the importance of context in legal interpretation, the effect of increasing digitalization on legal theory, and the utility of feminist and postmodern approaches to globalization and legal theory.