Digital Directions

The Yale Visual Law Project

Someone on Twitter mentioned a new student law journal with a difference - all pictures and no words!  Well, not quite so simple, but very visually effective.

The Yale Visual Law Project is a student-initiated alternative law journal that aims to produce smart, engaging documentaries on cutting-edge legal issues. Launched at the Yale Law School in the 2010-11 academic year, the Project runs a yearlong practicum where law students collaborate with skilled professionals to research, write, direct, and produce short documentaries.

In their first year, the project hopes to produce short films focussing on the community harms of racial profiling through the contexts of immigration policy, criminal law enforcement and national security policy.

An earlier post on their blog illustrated how the law students will attempt to articulate legal arguments in their films:

"One goal of our films is to show that in many of these cases, what the court is seeing on an individual level is, when you pull the camera back, also occurring on a group level. We are trying to make race, groups, and group harms – which are now largely invisible – visible to the courts. We are trying to show that what courts may visualize as a practice only affecting individuals in specific instances is, in fact, affecting larger groups, and that these groups are both disproportionately exposed to the practice and are suffering disproportionate harms as a result of their exposure."

I look forward to seeing some of their outputs (as noted in the interesting and varied syllabus) as productions very soon!

Commonwealth Conferences

The Commonweath Legal Education Association's biennial conference for 2011 will be in Bangalore, India running from 29-30th January 2011.  Their theme is "More Meaningful Legal Education in the 21st Century - Stepping out of the Ivory Tower".

Conference Topics may include:
• Consolidating National Legal Education Beyond the Profession
• Expanding Legal education in accordance with the demands of the global village.
• Internationalization of Legal Education and Research Activities
• In-sourcing the Technology-rich Knowledge Economy into Advanced Legal Education for
Maintaining High Standards
• Regulatory Models in Legal Education : Issues and Concerns
• Promoting Partnerships of Law Educators and Professionals
• The Role of Institutions Imparting Legal Education in Enhancing Professionalism and
Standards for the Value-based Conduct of Lawyers
• Teaching Legal literacy in the Commonwealth: The Role of Universities and Law Schools
• The Role of Commonwealth Universities and Law Schools in preparing Law students for
Legal Practice

Organised in association with the National Law School of India University, the submission of abstracts for the conference is open and has been extended until 10th December 2010.

The 17^th Commonwealth Law Conference is also taking place in Hyderabad, India from 5-9th February 2011 which will also host the 12th Commonwealth Moot, the international student competition.

The Conference will be addressed by the Chief Justices & Judges of Commonwealth jurisdictions, including Canada, Caribbean, UK, Africa, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia & New Zealand.

The theme of the conference is ‘Emerging  Economies and the Rule of Law: Challenges & opportunities’. The subjects discussed during the Conference amongst others will be Human Rights & Rule of Law; Corporate & Commercial Law; Federalism; Free & Fair Elections; Judicial Independence & Accountability.

National Law Student Forum

Yesterday, UKCLE launched its National Law Student Forum initiative with a pilot 36 hour event for invited law student representatives. The event aims were to:

• demonstrate how students can actively develop their contribution to the learnin  g process
• increase the students’ skills base, e.g. from note taking in meetings and preparing reports to committees to communication and negotiation skills
• set up a network for law students
• increase the students awareness of approaches to learning & teaching

The event was facilitated by Patricia McKellar and Michael Bromby (UKCLE) and Adam Mannis (UKCME) from another HEA subject centre which has been running student-oriented events since 2001.  Guest speakers included Ant Bagshaw, National Union for Students (NUS) and Rebecca Huxley-Binns, Law Teacher of the Year Winner 2010.

The success of the event was largely due to the students who attended!  All UK law schools were invited to nominate a delegate who could represent their students - some attendees were class/year/school reps, others were law society presidents or had other similar roles - and 20 were invited on a first-come first-served basis.  A range of second and third years attended from a range of institutions representing most geographic areas and types of law schools ranging from the well established to newly created LLB providers.

The staff running the event were extremely impressed at how quickly the delegates came together, socialised and integrated into a very productive group, having never met each other before.  Clearly their roles as student representatives and the common ground of studying the same discipline helped to facilitate this cohesion.

During the event, students worked in teams to identify issues, solve problems, and share best practice and experiences with each other.  Some of their outputs, ideas and suggestions will be reworked into posters, photo albums and short video clips which will be uploaded in due course.

Participating students will be producing a report containing what they have learned from the event for their home institution.  UKCLE will be collating, evaluating and disseminating these reports and the  process ourselves to take the initiative forward.

Students Play the Parts and Email (and Blog) the Scripts: Creating a Realistic E-Discovery Experience through Simulation

A recent blog post by Paula Schaefer, Associate Professor, University of Tennessee College of Law on the Best Practices for Legal Education blog reviews an interesting idea - using law students to develop learning materials.

"As I planned to teach pre-trial litigation for the first time in 2009, I wanted my case to include electronic-discovery (e-discovery). My research quickly revealed that the pre-packaged pre-trial litigation cases involved car accidents and simple contract disputes. No ESI (electronically stored information) was included, so it would be impossible to conduct e-discovery in these cases. Undeterred, I mused that I could make my own course materials from the contents of my overflowing email inbox.

From that idea, I developed a plan for a two-semester simulation. I offered a group of law students course credit (as an independent study) to email one another, following a loose script, to create a business dispute among their assigned characters. Their dispute would become the lawsuit in my pre-trial litigation class the following semester. In that course, the independent study students would play the clients and the witnesses, and the pre-trial litigation students would be their lawyers. 

The result was not just ESI, but also a realistic case that benefited both groups of students. The article about my experience is tentatively titled Legal Dispute Simulation Meets Pre-Trial Litigation Simulation: An Integrated Approach to Teaching E-Discovery Doctrine, Practice Skills, and Professionalism, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1676976."

Paula 'justifies' the students doing all the work as they will develop practical and professional skills whilst drafting the materials, and they also will learn about the substantive legal issues relating to e-discovery.  Paula also addressed whether this approach can work for other topics:

"Though I developed my simulation with e-discovery in mind, it could work in many doctrinal and skills classes. The simulation creates a complex business dispute with numerous claims, making it the perfect go-to example in a business torts class. The evidentiary issues generated could be the subject of an evidence class. The simulation characters could also make an appearance in skills classes like negotiation, contract drafting, trial practice, and transactional lawyering (like the University of Tennessee’s capstone Representing Enterprises). I have plans to invite another professor’s mediation students to my pre-trial litigation class next semester to see if they can mediate a resolution to the case prior to trial.  

My loose script for simulation characters (a link is provided in my article on SSRN) could be used by law students anywhere to create a new legal dispute. Or a professor could easily create a new script involving issues he or she is interested in exploring in a doctrinal or skills class. From my experience, I believe such simulations are worth the effort. These simulations can transform an ordinary class into something more realistic. And with that realism comes an opportunity for law students to make the transition to lawyers."