The Legal Skills Movement Ten Years On: Triumph or Compromise?
| Author | JULIE MACFARLANE |
| Date | 01 September 1997 |
| Published date | 01 September 1997 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.1997.tb00006.x |
Book
Reviews
The Legal Skills Movement Ten Years On: Triumph
or Compromise?
TEACHING LA WYERS’SKILLSedited by J. WEBB and
C.
MAUGHAN
(London: Butterworths,
1996,
439
pp., no price given)
In his foreword to this collection of essays on legal skills education, Avrom
Sherr describes some of the reasons why skills teaching has become
so
important in both vocational and undergraduate legal education in the last
ten years. He cites in particular ‘the changing nature of work in law and
the changing nature of the profession itself (at p. vi). The constant expan-
sion of legal regulation means that rather than provide students with an
exhaustive (but highly temporary) knowledge of the minutiae of legal rules
in any one subject area, it has become more important to ensure that lawyers
have excellent research and problem-solving skills that enable them to
continue to develop and enhance their knowledge once in practice. The
information explosion
-
not limited to law of course
-
has resulted in an
increasing pattern of specialization in legal practice. With this or any other
professional future in mind, the best preparation would appear to be a solid
foundation of basic legal principles and legal skills.
These changing workplace needs have resulted in a dramatic shift away
from the dominant information-transmission model of legal education.
Most law teachers now readily admit that the traditional ‘banking’ model
of law school training
-
treating law students’ minds as empty depositories
in which to store legal information
-
provides only a small part of what
our graduates need in order to operate effectively in the world of legal
practice and other professional milieux. The explicit teaching and
assessment of both intellectual and practical skills is now widely recognized
as a legitimate, even critical, part of an effective legal education. This
collection of essays, drawn together by Julian Webb and Caroline
Maughan, two of the early ‘skills pioneers’ in United Kingdom law schools,
is a reflection of this changing reality. Its fourteen essays canvas a wide
range of topics from learning theory, to teaching methods, to assessment
and evaluation. Unlike its predecessor, Learning Lurvyers’ Skiffs,’ this book
does not aspire to offer ready-made teaching materials but presents instead
a respectable range of views on some of the important theoretical and
conceptual issues surrounding the implementation of skills teaching.
440
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