From zero to 60: Building belief, capacity and community in Street Law instructors in one weekend
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Street Law, where law students or lawyers teach about the law in local school, correctional, and community settings, is the fastest growing and most popular type of experiential legal education in the world—and with good reason. The Street Law methodology helps make the law more relevant, more accessible, and more understandable to both participants in the program and lawyers and law students delivering the programming. Despite Street Law’s prevalence and popularity, there is scant guidance for how to best introduce and implement a program, little research support explaining why Street Law works, and even less empirical justification proving that the program works. This paper makes three significant and unique contributions to the emerging field of Street Law scholarship and research. First, we provide an in-depth explanation of the principles and learner-centered practices that make Street Law such a powerful tool for legal education. Second, we ground these principles and practices in a robust body of research, the first such effort in the field. Third, we offer an annotated step-by-step outline of a unique weekend orientation program developed and field-tested by the seminal Georgetown Street Law program and delivered in partnership with the Law Societies of Ireland and Scotland. It is our hope that this paper will offer practitioners both a series of best practices to draw upon and a reason to do so. A second paper, that will shortly follow this one, will share and discuss quantitative and qualitative data evidencing the powerful outcomes that this weekend orientation can effect in participants.Keywords:
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Legal Education
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Legal pedagogy has evolved to produce more efficient and dynamic practitioners of law. The Bar Council of India (BCI) has been instrumental in regulating legal education standards and monitoring the law colleges that issue law degrees since adopting the Advocates Act of 1961. The legal profession demands more than mere traditional classroom teaching-learning methods. Clinical Legal Education is a concept that enables the students to learn through practical experience. It also disseminates the passion of public interest and social services amongst law students, and not just with the pedagogic method.
Legal Aid, therefore, closely engages with Clinical Legal Education. The authors observe that a prevailing theory-practice gap in legal pedagogy can be bridged effectively through institutional mechanisms. This mission of producing justice-oriented legal professionals is paired with the massification of legal education.
Legal Education
Legal psychology
Empirical legal studies
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This article examines the shift towards experiential legal education and its implications. While others have focused on experiential education as a means of training better lawyers, the author advances the argument for experiential education because it is rooted in substantive problem-solving, access to justice, engagement with communities, and greater opportunities for reflective and critical thinking about law and justice. Drawing on examples from Osgoode Hall Law School, which adopted an experiential curricular requirement in 2012, the article explores the ways in which experiential education may change law school and law students. The article also canvasses the implications of the experiential shift for the future of legal education, and the blurring lines between law school and transitional professional education in law such as articling and Practical/Professional Legal Training Courses (PLTCs). Finally, a number of perspectives and research initiatives are presented to suggest that the benefits of an effectively designed experiential model are far reaching, from a learning environment that caters most effectively to the way in which students learn and access information, to increasing engagement with community needs, to the positive impacts on student wellness. Therefore, the article illustrates the significance of the experiential shift in legal education in the Canadian context as a critical driver in the evolution of the law school and professional legal education.
Legal Education
Experiential education
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ABSTRACT Questions about the importance and viability of legal research and writing as a part of the law school curriculum are not novel. Confronting these questions head-on, however, is a responsibility that should be handled by law librarians. This article addresses the issue of teaching legal research in an academic law library setting. The reasons why the author has pursued an aggressive approach when dealing with legal research instruction are explored. The methods employed to carry out that legal research instruction mandate are examined. creased as legal research and writing are more and more frequently combined and taught by writing faculty.1 At the same time, the research skills of law students are on a downward spiral. Howland and Lewis document this plunge in an informative survey.2 Law librarian Donald Dunn substantiates this decline and attributes it, in part, to “the increased emphasis in law schools on legal writing,”3 in consequence of which, while “legal writing entered the expressway; legal research took the off-ramp.”4 Further, law librarians and legal research have even been pummeled by one of America's most popular authors.5 In this environment, it may seem unwise to continue to advance the argument that academic law librarians should teach legal research. Notwithstanding the obstacles that face such instruction, law librarians have an obligation to press forward in this important work.6 Legal writing instructors have not demonstrated that they have the expertise to provide this instruc-tion.7 Likewise, law faculty have demonstrated that they do not have the interest in tackling the task.8 Say two authorities on the subject: “Regular faculty members generally do not teach a research course, and when they do decide to teach one, the results are invariably disastrous. Most law faculty members cannot teach legal research because they do not understand it themselves. If compelled to teach the course, they rebel.”9 Perhaps it is time for law schools to cede the stewardship for legal research instruction to those information professionals who have been trained and are qualified to teach legal research instruction -law librarians.10 And it is time for any reticent law librarians to accept the obligation to take a more proactive approach toward teaching legal research.11
Legal writing
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Empirical legal studies
Legal opinion
Legal psychology
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The American Bar Association requires that all law students receive “substantial instruction” in legal research. This article discusses a unique legal research program that meets this requirement by focusing on experiential learning. Two components of experiential learning, context and connections, are explained pedagogically and specifically as to legal research curriculum.
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The design of assignments is perhaps the most important pedagogical activity in teaching legal research and writing. This article is intended to help teachers of legal research and writing design course assignments that simultaneously teach legal research and legal writing skills within the overall context of introducing students to basic legal analysis.
Legal writing
Legal Education
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The National Conference of Bar Examiners has proposed the development of
a stand-alone legal research component to the bar exam. This recognition of
the importance of legal research skills highlights the need for increased attention
to legal research instruction in law schools. Professor Mersky looks at
the history of legal writing and legal research programs in law schools, notes
the continued demand by practitioners and the judiciary for improved legal
research skills among recent graduates, and suggests curricular and instructional
changes within the academy to address both these ongoing concerns and
the expectations of a new generation of students.
Legal writing
Legal psychology
Legal opinion
Empirical legal studies
Legal Education
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Clinical Legal Education came to Nigeria, first, as a solution to remedy the effects of epileptic access to justice and, further, to develop law students’ professional skills through rendering free legal services to indigent members of society. It was not received into the Nigerian legal pedagogy without some level of resistance, however with consistent lobbying it was eventually incorporated. The Clinical Legal Education program began with just five pilot university law clinics to implement the components of Clinical Legal Education. Despite this relatively small number, the program was able to satisfy its immediate objectives, pending other universities that could not resist the need to benefit from the program inculcated it into their legal pedagogy. Consequently, Nigeria now has 21 active university law clinics rendering free legal services to indigent persons and teaching community members about their legal rights. Offering free legal services and educating community members about their legal rights are not the end of the benefits of Clinical Legal Education. There are many other benefits that are derived from the Clinical Legal Education program and in this paper, as way of just one example, I examine the ways in which clinical legal education is helping to curb communal violence.
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Legal Pluralism
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Students have a simplistic view of legal research and writing, exacerbated by computerized research habits and the academic status of legal research and writing. This paper reviews the debates concerning the jurisprudential effects of traditional legal research tools and the impact of computerization on legal research tools, techniques, and the law itself. The paper presents a method for teaching legal research in a computerized world, emphasizing a command of the structure of legal information and the process of legal research as essential counters to the centrifugal effects of computerized research. The method enables students to recognize and deal effectively with indeterminacy and shows legal research and writing programs as teachers of real law.
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The best method for grasping legal research and legal analysis is to just do it. Learning Legal Research gives students everything they need to analyze and research situations at any point during the legislative process.
The book includes the cases—a feature that is critical for students lacking immediate access to law libraries. It can either stand alone or be used in conjunction with a Legal Research and Writing textbook.
Legal writing
Empirical legal studies
Legal psychology
Feature (linguistics)
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