Those of us who engage in the policy and practice of legal education design and curriculum reform seem to spend a lot of our time in a kind of endless groundhog day, where we have essentially many of the same debates about the value and values of legal education that (as a system) we’ve been […]
Last week I had the privilege of commenting on Michael Legg and Felicity Bell’s new book, AI and the Legal Profession (Oxford: Hart Publishing 2021), at their book launch in Sydney. Here is a slightly extended version of my comments (nearly 14 mins). If that’s TLDW, the takeaway is: if what you want is a […]
The very untimely death of Stanford’s Professor Deborah Rhode last week has robbed the legal academy of a distinctive voice and powerful commentator on legal ethics and the work of the legal profession. For those who don’t know Deborah’s story well, Stanford has published an excellent memorial here. My UK colleagues, Steven Vaughan and Richard […]
The Australian Federal Government has today added a further massive variable (aka thrown a hand grenade) into the calculations the sector is trying to make around fee income/student numbers for the next three years. We are still short on critical details, but the main points are, broadly: a substantial re-packaging of the variable fee regime […]
The question of what we can expect university and specifically legal education to look like after July has certainly been playing on my mind (and plenty of others!). This is obviously becoming a pressing issue, not just in terms of the proximity of semester 2, but also in the context of what seem to be […]
This post updates my last, reflecting some re-thinking at regulatory/policy levels and the emergence of more explicit policy adaptations at institutional level. Again I’m going to focus on the English and Australian systems as somewhat contrasting approaches. The SRA in England continues to be relatively active in this space. It has amended its guidance (published […]
Universities so far have struggled with the difficult and rapidly changing risk environment since the emergence of Covid-19. Responses have been variable in speed and intensity across institutions and jurisdictions, often reflecting the uncertainties fed down from government policy (or lack thereof). Information is patchy, but my sense is that teaching now in virtually all […]
The news last week that the Australian National University (ANU) plans to close down its School of Legal Practice, probably in 2021, represents another body blow to the idea that professional legal training (PLT) can be in any way consistent with the mission of a research-leading university. ANU has long been an innovator in this […]
Thanks to Jess Guth and the ALT, the LETR research team came together in Leeds (UK) on 25 June to revisit its work five years after publication of the 2013 Report. It was an excellent and thought-provoking conference, ad interesting to see the ways in which developments in the last five years can be benchmarked […]
The Regulating Automated Legal Advice Technologies (RALAT) project is an initiative of the Melbourne Networked Society Institute, involving a team of researchers from law and computer science. Our first Discussion Paper, which aims primarily to map the field is available here. The paper classifies automated legal advice tools/technologies (ALATs) by reference both to function and intelligent capability. […]
hEaD space 