Profession, Education & Regulation in Law
The Centre for Profession, Education and Regulation in Law focuses upon legal education, the legal profession and the transformation, partly through regulation, of both. It generates and shares research towards extending the value of legal education and the contribution of the legal profession to society at large.
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PEARL researcher Dr Liz Curran presents to the Oxford Human Rights Hub on Realizing the right to health for the most disadvantaged
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In early September two members of PEARL will be presenting at the Society of Legal Scholars conference at Oxford University.
- Professor Paul Maharg (Director, PEARL) will be presenting with Dirk Rodenburg (Queen’s University, Ontario) on The Redress of Legal Education, and
- Craig Collins and Paul Maharg will be participating on an expert panel of four legal education scholars about Technology and the Future of Legal Education – this follows on from a special edition of The Law Teacher (UK) edited by Paul and including papers from Paul and Craig, together with colleagues from the USA, UK and Australia.
Imagination and Legal Reasoning: History, Theory, Pedagogy: An International, Interdisciplinary, One-Day Workshop (Queen Mary London)
Follow Paul Maharg's live blog.
This event is part of the ‘Legal Mind Network’, founded by Dr Maks Del Mar, Reader in Legal Theory at Queen Mary University of London. This network is an international collaboration between the Department of Law, QMUL, the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto and the PEARL Centre at the ANU College of Law, Australian National University. The network explores the theory and history of legal reasoning and its teaching, under the heading of three concepts: Imagination, Communication and Cognition.
A triad of workshops is planned:
- London 2016: ‘Legal Reasoning and Imagination: History, Theory and Pedagogy’ (June, 2016, organiser Dr. Maks Del Mar)
- Canberra 2017: ‘Legal Reasoning and Communication: History, Theory and Pedagogy’ (June, 2017, organiser Professor Paul Maharg)
- Toronto 2018: ‘Legal Reasoning and Cognition: History, Theory and Pedagogy’ (June, 2018, organiser Professor Simon Stern)
The Legal Mind Network a collaboration of PEARL, Queen Mary University of London, and the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto will begin with the first Workshop hosted by Queen Mary London on the theme: Imagination and Legal Reasoning: History, Theory, Pedagogy.
PEARL researcher, Scott Chamberlain, will be joining colleagues at the MNSI on the 'Automated Online Legal Service Project', for which seed funding has just been approved by MNSI. Scott leads our 'Future Justice' research cluster (click on 'Research' tab to view other projects). For more details, or if you may have an interest in related projects or future collaboration, please contact Scott.
The Centre for Profession, Education and Regulation in Law (PEARL) aims to generate and share high-quality research on the theories and practices of legal education and the legal profession, and the regulation of both. One key focus is systemic reviews of existing research within these domains.
Our research supports a range of projects that present radical alternatives to conventional legal educational curricula, in areas such as curriculum design, problem-based learning, clinical learning, transactional learning, use of technology, public legal education, legal writing and legal reasoning. This also extends to analyses of interdisciplinary interventions, particularly involving medical and allied health education and professional education generally.
In this way, we build collaborative networks across disciplines and with national and international institutions, including regulatory bodies.
The Centre is interdisciplinary, future-orientated and international in outlook and its members regularly collaborate with international scholars and institutions.
Research clusters
The Centre’s research is structured by research clusters of scholars working on various projects having a common theme. The research clusters are collaborative online spaces, enabling scholars from near and far to combine effectively towards producing specific research outputs.
- Access to Justice
- Assessment in Legal Education: Global Critical Perspectives
- Ethics in the Legal Profession and Legal Education
- Future Justice
- Legal Mind Network: History, Theory and Pedagogy of Legal Reasoning
- Legal Writing
- Problem Based Learning in Legal Education
- Simulation in Legal Education
- Transitions to Practice
- Wellbeing
The Centre also offers opportunities for publication through PEARL Press, and for promoting awareness of publications and output using other avenues.
International network development
Most of the Centre’s clusters and projects contain international researchers and institutions bringing breadth, difference and fresh experience and insight to the research collaborations.
Staff
Scott Chamberlain
Senior Lecturer
Craig Collins
Senior Lecturer
Elizabeth Curran
Senior Lecturer
Vivien Holmes
Associate Professor
Members
Paul Maharg
Professor
International advisory board
Latest news
Director of the ANU Legal Workshop, Gary Tamsitt, departs after a four-decade association with the University.
The transition from law student to newly-admitted lawyer is a critical time, not only for the mental health and wellbeing of these lawyers but for the future of the profession.
Professor Paul Maharg heads up our newest research Centre, the PEARL (Profession, Education and Regulation in Law) Collaborative.
ANU College of Law Professor Paul Maharg, is part of a team of legal education experts that will be working with the Hong Kong Law Society to undertake consultation with the market and stakeholders on the possibility of a common entrance examination for
In the Media
Attorney-General George Brandis set to silence CLCs
Elizabeth Curran writes in The Saturday Paper
Pell was wrong to blame the lawyers, but they aren’t blameless
Vivien Holmes writes in The Conversation
Upcoming events
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Past events
Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow: A case study in lawyer regulation
- John Briton, former Queensland Legal Services Commissioner
National Law Reform Conference
- The Hon Michael Kirby AC CMG
- Professor Margaret Thornton
- Professor Margaret Davies
- Professor Simon Rice OAM
- Mr Julian Morrow
Furthering the collaborative, distributed and open-access principles that underlie Centre practices, research is conducted within specific project teams falling under the wider umbrella of a research cluster. A research cluster may have multiple active projects and a project may have multiple outputs.
Outputs may include: a book, an article, a conference paper, a series of explorations or investigations, a data project, slide set, workshop, systematic review, the development of innovations in educational heuristics that will lead to a research programme - the categories are not closed. The research output will be agreed between project team members and the Deputy Director.
Clusters and projects are initially approved by the Deputy Director who will organise the initial setup of any new clusters and project spaces.
The Centre will promote the work of the cluster and project teams where possible and final research outputs may appear on the Centre’s publication list or, if published externally, linked via the Centre’s website.
Projects & clusters
Wellbeing
Contact: Stephen TangThe Wellbeing research cluster explores how law students, legal professionals and other legal actors think, feel and act in their law-related roles and contexts in positive and negative ways. The project will examine how psychological wellbeing and mental health are directly affected by legal education and practice. It will also apply psychological methods and theory to understand the personal and social processes which help law students and lawyers to develop and thrive not only as ethical, competent professionals but also critical, creative, reflective and values-oriented people.
The first output for this project is an article in the University of New South Wales Law Journal Tang, S. and Foley, T (2014). The practice of law and the intolerance of certainty, 37, 3 UNSW Law Review 1198. Further work is planned for 2016.
Transitions to Practice
Contact:
This project will build on the learnings from the experiences of Protégé.
This project will assess the efficacy of Protégé, an online community of practice designed for early career Australian migration agents.
This project will examine lessons learned and research into communities of practice to determine how they can be integrated within a capstone course curriculum that will combine individual cognition and socio-cultural learning for large cohorts of students.
The Legal Profession Act 2004 (Vic) requires newly admitted lawyers to complete between 18 months and 2 years of 'supervised legal practice' before becoming eligible for a full practising cetrtificate. The Act does not define 'supervision' and policy guidelines are vague and general. By reference to other jurisdictions, this project seeks to lend substance to the supervision requirement to ensure that, for junior lawyers, their developmental opportunities are real, rather than just a matter of serving time.
This project examines the experiences of new lawyers in their first year of practice, specifically how they make the transition from student to lawyer and develop their professional identity.
The legal mind network: History; theory and pedagogy of legal reasoning
Contact: Paul MahargImagination, communication and cognition are not words normally associated with legal reasoning but they are concepts that lie at the heart of legal analysis and legal education. These concepts are the focus of a network, The Legal Mind Network, set up by Maksymilian Del Mar at Queen Mary University of London, to explore fresh ways of thinking about legal reasoning and its teaching. The ANU College of Law’s Centre for Professional Education and Regulation in Law is collaborating with the Queen Mary and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in this cross-disciplinary inquiry into legal reasoning and its teaching, combining both contemporary accounts and pedagogical challenges with comparative and historical themes.
Three workshops will be held by the collaborating institutions on the history, theory and pedagogy of legal reasoning. These workshops will bring together scholars from a range of different disciplines all interested in legal reasoning – with a focus on discussing common themes as well as differences in the history and theory of the practice of legal reasoning and its teaching Papers from the conferences will be published.
London, 15 June 2016, organiser Maksymilian Del Mar
Canberra 2017. Mid-June, organiser Paul Maharg.
Simulation in legal education
Contact: Paul MahargSimulation is still a relatively rare method of legal education. It does not form part of the 'signature pedagogy' of law, nor of its 'signature assessment' culture. This cluster aims to change that. Through a number of projects involving a range of disciplines and professions, this cluster investigates how simulation can be designed for legal education, its effects on learning and assessment and its wider role within education in the community of the law. Projects will aim to investigate how, through simulation, legal education can move beyond merely acquiring knowledge to forms of participation that include, in John Dewey's terms, doing, becoming and belonging.
Simulated clients are non-lawyers who are trained to play the role of clients and others (eg witnesses) and are used in a variety of different learning and assessment roles in legal education. While there have been a number of positive studies in different jurisdictions regarding the design and use of simulated clients in educational settings, there has not been an international overview of the way they are used in different jurisdictions, or their effectiveness in educating and assessing law students and lawyers. This project is focused around hosting an international workshop at the ANU College of Law on simulated clients, and a subsequent peer-reviewed collection of workshop proceedings.
- John Garvey, University of New Hampshire Law School
- Leo Martin, University of Strathclyde Law School
- Wilson Chow, University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
- Michael Ng, University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law
- Clark Cunningham, Georgia State University College of Law
- Rory O’Boyle, Law Society of Ireland
- Freda Grealy, Law Society of Ireland
- Debra Nestel, HealthPEER Faculty, University of Monash
This project seeks to build on the experience of other institutions that have constructed digital simulation engines such as SIMPLE (SIMulated Professional Learning Environment) in Scotland, Cyberdam in the Netherlands, and VOS (Virtual Office Space) in Australia. Funding is being sought to specify and design a new-generation engine, scalable, with open architecture and capable of supporting multiple forms of digital simulations across a variety of professions, build, test and evaluate student learning upon this platform, and publish the research findings.
- John Garvey, University of New Hampshire Law School
- Leo Martin, University of Strathclyde Law School
- Frances Murray, University of Strathclyde Law School
- Kees van Haaster, Kenniscentrum Sociale Innovatie, ISW, Hogeschool Utrecht
- Karen Counsell, University of South Wales
Problem-based learning in legal education
Contact: Paul MahargProblem-based learning (PBL) is an effective and powerful method of learning the intellectual structure and skills of a discipline and a profession. It derives largely from the medical and health sciences. This cluster explores how a number of different law schools are approaching PBL, the variety of methods they use, the variation between practices, the achievements of students, the place of ethics and moral values in a PBL curriculum, and the effects on academics and other staff in the law school. The ANU College of Law is developing its own PBL program and is forming links with other law schools implementing similar learning approaches, including York Law School and Nottingham Law School in the United Kingdom.
An edited book on problem based learning in the teaching of law will be produced by PEARL Press, comprising the papers given at the conference.
A workshop or conference will be held in 2017, on problem based learning in Law.
Legal writing
Contact: Craig CollinsThe Legal Writing research cluster explores theoretical, historical and practical dimensions to legal writing, including how legal writing is shaped by technology and developed by legal education.
The research seeks to place legal writing within the broader historical and theoretical framework of law, discourse and social analysis and, at a practical level, proposes strategies and interventions for assisting law students and lawyers to develop technical proficiency with the art of the written word.
This project seeks to research how writing can support student learning in Law. It takes as its departure point recent research by Spirgel and Delaney which shows that before students can 'write to learn they must first learn to write'. Our pilot research project will set out to determine if this is true of writing practices in Australian law schools.
Just as DNA analysis can tell genealogical stories and explain ways of being for living individuals, exploring the evolutionary path of the common law tradition can yield fresh insights into effective legal communication today.
Future justice
Contact: Scott ChamberlainThe Future Justice cluster examines the impact of technology upon law and legal practice at multiple levels. It includes:
- predicting how technology can generate a restructuring of justice systems in modern societies
- examining the impact of technology upon lawyers, law firms and the regulation of legal professions, and
- the application of argument-mapping techniques towards achieving more effective e-discovery for modern litigation.
This project will test the hypothesis that argument mapping results in more effective e-discovery.
This project introduces and develops the concept of Justice Divided as a concept for analysing and developing new ways of doing law and delivering justice as technology revolutionises the legal profession.
This project analyses and predicts the impact technology could and should have on the way modern societies structure their justice systems.
This project examines the potential impact of technology on lawyers, law firms and the regulation of the legal profession.
Ethics in the Legal Profession and Legal Education
Contact: Vivien HolmesThis ethics cluster contains projects dedicated to exploring ethics and professionalism in legal practice through an interdisciplinary lens. The projects are also focused on researching effective ways to help students develop ethical skills for legal practice.
This project is focused on evaluating the effectiveness of the ‘Giving Voice to Values’ (GVV) module for legal ethics, professional development and wellbeing.
Assessment in Legal Education: Global Critical Perspectives
Contact: Paul MahargThis cluster is focused on developing a series of books that provide a global view of assessment in legal education in common law jurisdictions. Each volume in the series will highlight innovative research, theory and practice, as well as the regulatory issues and cultural and social practices that affect assessment in legal education. They will also focus on a single jurisdiction and provide:
- a broad representative sample of assessment practices and thinking in legal education within a jurisdiction
- insights into how assessment can be used effectively in legal education across jurisdictions
- appreciation of the multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research bases that are emerging in the field of assessment generally, and
- analyses and suggestions of how assessment innovations may be transferred from one jurisdiction to another.
We aim to publish books that evidence at least some of the following themes and traits:
- Disciplinary grounding
Our series will investigate the relation between more conventional ‘signature pedagogies’ and ‘signature assessments’, and new approaches to learning and its assessment. This investigation will not be historical alone: essential as it is to understand how our practices have come to be as they are, the series will point to useful directions for the future of legal education assessment, in the wider context of academic, professional, and legal educational global and local change. - Assessment, collaboration and social relations
Many new forms of educational practice such as games, simulations, and PBL are often highly social and collaborative. While there is much published on such areas in other disciplines, eg medical education, there is little in legal education; and we aim to change that. - Design-led assessment
One of the significant differences between conventional teaching and assessment is the design work that links learning and assessment and that goes beyond conventional ideas of alignment. Our series will seek out innovative examples of design-led assessment in all forms of legal education. - Innovative research methodologies
We encourage all forms of action research (practice research, participatory action research, action science, etc) as well as the challenging of conventional approaches to educational theory and constructs of assessment.
Each volume will be edited by a legal educator local to the jurisdiction, and the volume may be the output of a jurisdictional-wide conference or workshop. The editor will write an interpretive Introduction setting out for that jurisdiction the:
- major social and institutional pressures on assessment
- educational challenges & successes
- regulatory issues and the position of regulators vis-à-vis assessment
- future directions of educational theory and practice within legal education assessment.
This would form a template for each volume’s introduction, and help readers to compare across jurisdictions on these and similar issues. We would also ask editors to engage jurisdictional regulators to contribute on assessment from their perspective, having read the draft contributions (which will be available from the PEARL research cluster platform, Asana).
We aim to publish volumes on at least seven jurisdictions, with the final volume gathering up and stating core themes for the future. Our first volume, on England and Wales, will be published in PEARL Press in 2016, followed by a volume on the USA. The series will thus be an international resource for academics, students, regulators, accreditors, educationalists, educators, technologists and legal librarians. It will bring together some of the best contemporary commentators to challenge, inform and critique assessment of legal education globally.
Access to Justice
Contact: Elizabeth CurranThe Access to Justice research cluster explores the roles and responsibilities carried by legal professionals and lawmakers in making justice accessible to all members within our communities. The rule of law and human rights protection fails to the extent that access to justice is denied. This project is focused on examining the difficulties faced in accessing justice by vulnerable and disadvantaged members of society, as well as the vital role performed by community legal centres and similar legal services.
This evaluation uncovered a number of key lessons on how to deliver effective service and improvements to policing and the courts in relation to family violence assistance and representation. The project has provided a venue for women’s experiences of violence, the court system and the legal process and support system, to be heard through a research project.
This project aims to examine effective practices to assist the vulnerable and disadvantaged - those most unlikely to gain legal assistance - gain access to the help they need. It will examine the flow on effect of building the capacity of different disciplines to identify, assist and advocate for clients/patients and where possible collaborate to bring about systemic change that improves that social and health determinants of community and leads to positive outcomes in lives.
The Centre for Profession, Education and Regulation in Law is committed to open access, and to disseminating its research as widely as possible through print and electronic publication. The Centre’s publications are published in a variety of formats, with peer-reviewed research published through the PEARL Press Monograph Series, under the aegis of the ANU Press. The PEARL Discussion Paper Series is published in the ANU Digital Collections. Research associated with the work of Centre researchers published elsewhere is available through External Publications
The Centre is keen to explore new formats and genres of academic research with researchers, and so our PEARL Press Board remains open to the possibility and potential of publishing new types of research and research content. This is in keeping with ANU Press's own policy on innovative forms of academic publication. The Centre’s publication policies and processes for peer review are overseen by the PEARL Press Editorial Board. To discuss any aspect of publication or publication projects, please contact Paul Maharg, Chair of the Editorial Board.
PEARL Press monographs
Our PEARL Press Monograph series publishes a variety of academic texts -- single-author monographs, edited collections, gatherings of research results, analyses of policy on major themes or issues, the proceedings of workshops or conferences, or reports on major pieces of consultancy research. All PEARL Press books are peer-reviewed, a process overseen by the PEARL Press Editorial Board, and published through ANU Press for print-on-demand sale and for free download in PDF, HTML and mobile device formats.
Publication is normally undertaken only where there is a link with the activities of the Centre, or with the ANU College of Law. However, the Centre is open to new ideas, genres, or texts in any of the three areas of its activities, namely legal education, the legal profession and the regulation of both. Book publication proposals can be sent to the Chair of the Editorial Board, Paul Maharg.
Discussion paper series
Informal papers produced by members of the Centre as a result of the research they are undertaking and reviewed by the PEARL Press Editorial Board before publication, but not peer-reviewed, are published in ANU Digital Collections under the category of PEARL Centre Discussion Papers. Authors and titles are listed below that in chronological order.
External publications
The following publications by Centre researchers have been published outside the PEARL Press Monographs, Journal and Discussion Paper Series. They include books, book chapters, journal articles, reports, slide sets and, in the future, will include datasets as well. The listing is alphabetical by author, starting in 2016
2016
- Collins, C. (2016). Story Interface and Strategic Design for New Law Curricula 50(1) The Law Teacher 98-113.
- Maharg, P. (2016). Editorial: Learning/Technology 50(1) The Law Teacher 15-23.
- Maharg, P. (2016). Disintermediation 50(1) The Law Teacher 114-131.
- Thornton, M. ‘The Flexible Cyborg: Work/Life Balance in the Legal Profession’ (2016) 38(1) Sydney Law Review 1-21.
- Thornton, M. ‘Work/life or work/work? Corporate legal practice in the twenty-first century’ (2016) 23(1) International Journal of the Legal Profession 13-39.
2015
- Ching, J., Maharg, P., Sherr, A., Webb, J., "An overture for well-tempered regulators: four variations on a LETR theme" (2015) The Law Teacher, 49, 2, 143-64.
- Foley, T., Holmes, V., Tang, S., Rowe, M., "Helping junior lawyers thrive" (2015) Law Institute Journal, September, 89, 9, 26.
- Ferguson, A., "Creating practice-ready, well and professional law graduates' (2015) Journal of Learning Design, 8, 2.
- Ferguson, A., Seul-gi Lee, E., "The development of the virtual educational space: how transactional online teaching can prepare today's law graduates for today's virtual age" (2015) European Journal of Law and Technology, BILETA Edition, 6, 1.
- Holmes, V. ‘Giving Voice to Values: enhancing students’ capacity to cope with ethical challenges in legal practice (2015) 18 Legal Ethics 2, 115-137
- Maharg, P., "European Journal of Law and Technology" (2015). BILETA Edition, 6, 1, four items.
- Maharg, P., "‘Democracy begins in conversation’: The phenomenology of problem-based learning and legal education" (2015) Nottingham Law Journal, 24, 1.
- Maharg, P., "Shared space: regulation, technology and legal education in a global context" (2015) European Journal of Law and Technology, 5, 1.
- Maharg, P. Interview met Paul Maharg, Christ’l Dullaert, Monique van de Griendt, Juriaan Mensch (eds), De Nieuwe Advocaat. Nieuwe Kansen voor Ondernemende Advocaten, (2015). Sdu Uitgevers, Den Haag, 459-69.
Activities archive
In early September two members of PEARL will be presenting at the Society of Legal Scholars conference at Oxford University.
- Professor Paul Maharg (Director, PEARL) will be presenting with Dirk Rodenburg (Queen’s University, Ontario) on The Redress of Legal Education, and
- Craig Collins and Paul Maharg will be participating on an expert panel of four legal education scholars about Technology and the Future of Legal Education – this follows on from a special edition of The Law Teacher (UK) edited by Paul and including papers from Paul and Craig, together with colleagues from the USA, UK and Australia.
Imagination and Legal Reasoning: History, Theory, Pedagogy: An International, Interdisciplinary, One-Day Workshop (Queen Mary London)
Follow Paul Maharg's live blog.
This event is part of the ‘Legal Mind Network’, founded by Dr Maks Del Mar, Reader in Legal Theory at Queen Mary University of London. This network is an international collaboration between the Department of Law, QMUL, the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto and the PEARL Centre at the ANU College of Law, Australian National University. The network explores the theory and history of legal reasoning and its teaching, under the heading of three concepts: Imagination, Communication and Cognition.
A triad of workshops is planned:
- London 2016: ‘Legal Reasoning and Imagination: History, Theory and Pedagogy’ (June, 2016, organiser Dr. Maks Del Mar)
- Canberra 2017: ‘Legal Reasoning and Communication: History, Theory and Pedagogy’ (June, 2017, organiser Professor Paul Maharg)
- Toronto 2018: ‘Legal Reasoning and Cognition: History, Theory and Pedagogy’ (June, 2018, organiser Professor Simon Stern)
The Legal Mind Network a collaboration of PEARL, Queen Mary University of London, and the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto will begin with the first Workshop hosted by Queen Mary London on the theme: Imagination and Legal Reasoning: History, Theory, Pedagogy.
PEARL researcher, Scott Chamberlain, will be joining colleagues at the MNSI on the 'Automated Online Legal Service Project', for which seed funding has just been approved by MNSI. Scott leads our 'Future Justice' research cluster (click on 'Research' tab to view other projects). For more details, or if you may have an interest in related projects or future collaboration, please contact Scott.
Paul Maharg gave the keynote address at the inaugural Directions in Legal Education conference at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. You can view his slides at http://paulmaharg.com/slides. He liveblogged the rest of the conference on his website, where you can view details of plenary and parallel sessions, as well as his final thoughts on the conference.
PEARL researcher, Dr Liz Curran has been invited to present and discuss her research on Health-Justice Partnerships (HJP) in the latter half of 2016, including at the WELMA Centre at the University of Copenhagen Law School, National Centre for Medical Legal Partnerships in Washington DC, Trent University, City University London and University College London. She is also presenting a paper on HJP at the International Legal Ethics Conference in New York. Dr Curran has also been assisting a range of start-up HJPs in Ontario Canada.
14-15 April 2016: PEARL contributes to the Legal Practice stream of this conference through presentations by the following members: Paul Maharg, Margaret Thornton, Craig Collins, Vivien Holmes, Stephen Tang and Liz Curran.
Vivien Holmes published ‘Giving Voice to Values: enhancing students’ capacity to cope with ethical challenges in legal practice in Legal Ethics 2, 18, 115-137.
11-12 April 2016: Paul Maharg presents at the conference hosted by the British and Irish Law Education and Technology Association (BILETA) at the University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom.
Alexandra Johnstone and Barry Yau (ANU Legal Workshop) will be presenting on the above topic at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) as part of the Law, Literature and the Humanities Association of Australasia Conference 2015.
PEARL member Professor Margaret Thornton (ANU), together with Professor Richard Collier (Newcastle University, UK), will be presenting a seminar on the above topic at the ACT Supreme Court on Thursday, 19 November 2015 from 5.30-6.30pm, with drinks to follow. Sponsored by the Australian Academy of Law, this presentation compares and contrasts contemporary approaches to work/life balance in the context of UK and Australian law firms.
A new article by Tony Foley, Vivien Holmes, Stephen Tang and Margie Rowe. They point out that the wellbeing of newly admitted lawyers is significantly shaped by their early experience of legal work. An environment that develops lawyers’ autonomy, competence and relatedness to others can minimise psychological distress and promote thriving.
Anneka Ferguson answers that question in her latest article published in a legal education special issue of the Journal of Learning Design. She demonstrates how essential it is that well-being and professionalism are strongly integrated in the law school curriculum, so that students can continue to integrate the two when they move into their professional lives. This is a key theme in a number of PEARL’s research clusters, and is a strand in the work of both Anneka and Elizabeth Seul-gi Lee, both scholars with PEARL, who recently published on how transactional online teaching can prepare law graduates for contemporary practice.
Associate Professor Tony Foley, one of PEARL's scholars, has been recognised by OLT with a 2015 Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning. He is commended for 'innovation in the field of clinical legal education that provides students with a capstone experience that prepares them as future legal professionals.' This is a significant recognition of Tony’s contribution to legal education (especially in clinical programs) and to tertiary education more generally. Congratulations Tony!
One of Tony's projects in PEARL's Wellbeing cluster focuses on developing and evaluating a ‘Curriculum on Legal Ignorance‘: Effects on professional development and wellbeing. For a recent publication on this project, see Tang, S. and Foley, T (2014). The practice of law and the intolerance of uncertainty, 37, 3 UNSW Law Review 1198.
Liz Curran will be discussing some of the approaches and developments emerging from her Health Justice Partnership research evaluations at the forum in Melton Victoria.
List of speakers:
- Denis Nelthorpe CEO, Western Community Legal Centre
- Joan Eddy Manager Counselling Services, Djerriwarrh Health Services
- Liz Curran Senior Lecturer, ANU Legal Workshop & MWS evaluator
- Christine Levy Coordinator, Family Services, Melton City Council
- Stephanie Tonkin Program Manager – Legal Practice BMCLC, and MWS project manager
Pages
The Flexible Cyborg:Work-Life Balance in Legal practice (312.23 KB)‘Work/life balance’ (WLB) emerged as the catchcry of workers everywhere in the late 20th century. It was particularly appealing to women lawyers as it was thought that if a balance could be effected between work and life, satisfying careers and the raising of children could be combined. The key to effecting this balance, it was believed, was flexible work. Technology has facilitated this flexibility as all that is required is a computer, or other device with internet connection, and a mobile phone. Provided that the firm is agreeable, the lawyer would have a degree of autonomy in determining when and where the work is carried out. However, flexible work has not always proved to be the boon that was hoped, for the shift from face-time to virtual time has blurred the boundary between work and life, insidiously extending the hours of work and impinging on the realm of intimacy. Drawing on a web-based survey and interviews with lawyers Australia-wide, this article considers the ramifications of perpetual connectivity for lawyers in private practice, with particular regard to its gender significance.
State disinvestment in higher education has been a notable characteristic of neoliberalism all over the world and the corporatization of universities has been the typical response. It has led to a proliferation of law schools with students paying high fees. Corporatization has also engendered a culture of relentless competition between universities, which manifests itself in league tables and rankings. The pursuit of prestige has compelled law schools to prioritize research over teaching, which poses a dilemma for what is taught and how it is taught. The contradictions of the corporatization thesis are graphically illustrated by the experiences of Australia, which might be described as the canary in the mine shaft. While corporatization plays out differently in decentralized regimes with a substantial private sector, such as the United States, its impact on the legal academy has been similarly profound. The dilemmas posed by corporatization for the legal academy require considered scholarly attention.
- Higher Education Academy, UK
- GAJE – Global Alliance for Justice Education
- Centre for Computer-Assisted Learning and Instruction (CALI), Chicago, USA
- Osgoode Hall Law School and Osgoode Professional Development, York University, Toronto
- Hong Kong University Faculty of Law
- Chinese University of Hong Kong Law School
- Dundee Medical School, UK
- University of Copenhagen
- University College London
- Nottingham Law School, Centre for Legal Education
