Transforming Legal Education ― Learning and Teaching the Law in the Early Twenty-first Century

The liberal model of legal education is increasingly being undermined--economically, commercially, culturally, educationally--by chronic underfunding and the pressures of neoliberalist policies and globalization, argues Maharg (U. of Strathclyde, UK), and what is needed is a new critical legal education that embraces multiliteracies and is multimodal, as well as one that takes account of the blurring of the domains of academic and everyday work and leisure, authority and purpose, market and individual choice, and knowledge-in-itself and knowledge-for-others. It also must account for the social relations that influence knowledge generation and the evolution of knowledge, change to cope with the pressures of globalization on higher education, and promote greater engagement between higher education and the professions. In service of this goal, he reappraises the current model of legal education from the perspective of a transactional realist approach based in Deweyan pragmatism. Part of this reappraisal is conducted through the examination of historical moments that include the 1920s encounter between Dewey and the realist reformers in Columbia Law School, 18th century Enlightenment conceptualizations of moral education, and medieval forms of reading and writing, along with their present-day implications for, respectively, the New Legal Realism movement in the US, methods of ethical education in law schools, and communicative forms embodied by the wireless web and social software. He also addresses the implications of recent issues in e-learning. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Paul Maharg is Professor of Law at the Australian National University, and Professor of Law at Nottingham Law School. He has published extensively in the areas of legal education and legal critique. He has worked with regulators, law firms and law schools in England, Scotland, Canada, USA, Hong Kong and Australia.