Digital Directions

Enhancing Legal Education in Scotland Event - part two

 Kevin Kerrigan from Northumbria University and myself ran an afternoon session at the UKCLE event in Edinburgh on Developing the Undergraduate Law Student Experience (see blog post: Enhancing Legal Education in Scotland Event for the morning session).  Kevin spoke about how Northumbria, Westminster and others have sought to combine their undergrad substantive law programmes with the one year vocational skills course and the two year practise-based traineeship.  Bringing aspects together from each of the previously separate entities there can be a more logical progression from, for example, criminal law to procedure to advocacy; or land law to conveyancing.  Students are still afforded the opportunity to exit with a traditional liberal-arts style LLB and must do so unless they secure the traineeship-syle placements necessary for the remainder of the 5 year programme at a particular stage.

This reminded me of the problem-based learning approach adopted by York University (see previous blog post: What McMaster did for medical training, can York do for legal education?) last year, and of course, the recent development of the clinical LLB at Strathclyde more recently discussed in the post below.

My own presentation looked at some of the less radical means of enhancing the undergraduate experience that may not require a complete refocus of the programme, or financial / time consuming clinics – both of which can be highly commended, but require enormous effort.

I illustrated my talk with three examples: work-related learning, which includes clinics, simulations, and problem-based learning.  Some of which may be time or resource intensive, but on occasion can be a short 2 day simulation package.  Secondly, the internationalisation of staff, students and the programme; and thirdly, examples of tools and technologies that universities should perhaps be adopting to equip our students with skills for the 21^st century.

The slides from this, and from other presenters on the day, will most likely appear on the UKCLE website’s Scotland Pages in due course, but for now - mine is below.

Developing the undergraduate student experience

View more presentations from UK Centre for Legal Education.

Pro Bono Week, Strathclyde's Law Clinic and Legal Education

Yesterday saw the launch of the extended law clinic at Strathclyde University.  Since its inception in 2003, the clinic has expanded to include not only the initial advice sessions in Glasgow, but also an outreach project in Greenock, to the West of Glasgow.  Earlier this year, their work as a law clinic was recognised by the LawWorks and Attorney General’s Student Pro Bono Awards 2009, shortlisted for three of the four awards and taking home the award for the Best Contribution by an Individual Law School – this being the first time that the awards have been open to students in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

A Prisons Project has also been designed and run by the Clinic’s student volunteers to offer guidance and information to prisoners on their employment rights, specifically in relation to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974.  This will be offered to five prisons in and around the Glasgow area.

Supported financially, by both university sources and externally by law firms, the Law Clinic relies more so on the dedicated time of students, supervising staff and both solicitors and counsel who provide their advice pro bono.  The evening was supported by the Lord Advocate, Elish Angiolini, head of the Crown Office which directs all public prosecutions in Scotland.  Not only a Strathclyde alumna, but also a strong proponent of pro bono work, the Lord Advocate had earlier this week promoted the National Pro Bono week in Scotland.  Lord Phillips, the LibDem peer, spoke highly of the Law Clinic and other law schools (estimated at approx 100 in England and Wales) who offer students the opportunity to work with clients, but also reminded the audience that whilst pro bono can and does work well, there is still an over burdened legal aid system that cannot cope with the increases in legislation.  Providing pro bono services can, said Lord Phillips, remind the profession of what they profess... making comparisons to the medical profession with the overarching Hippocratic Oath, there exists no counterpart for the legal profession.

One future development, highlighted by the Law Clinic’s director Prof Donald Nicolson, is the establishment of a clinical LLB at Strathclyde from 2010.  This will enable students to reflect on their clinical cases and gain credit for their performance in both training and live case management.

This example of change to the delivery of undergraduate legal education reminded me of the discussions at the UKCLE event in Edinburgh, of which the afternoon sessions are still un-blogged!  See the next post...!

Enhancing Legal Education in Scotland Event

This was the first UKCLE event in Scotland (that wasn’t attached to another event) for some time, and possibly the first event to involve representatives from all levels of legal education.  The event was held in Edinburgh and was well attended by over 50 delegates – mainly from academic institutions (representing both the LLB and postgraduate diploma stage) but the legal profession was also widely represented by the Law Society of Scotland, HR directors and managers, heads of training and partners from law firms.

The first keynote from Alastair Robertson (HEA, Academy Scotland) covered a range of issues including the changing nature of the student learning experience, new ways of relating to businesses and the profession and forthcoming challenges: in particular how the four nations of the UK will contribute to devolved policy and the likely divergence that may lead to tensions.  Relating to news earlier this week that England & Wales have a new framework for HE - will there be pressure to adopt similar or distinctly different policy in Scotland?  Alastair also spoke of graduate attributes and what it means to be a graduate of a particular HEI or in a particular discipline such as law.

Prof Margaret Ross (University of Aberdeen) spoke about the diversity of the legal education student body and the study of law for its own sake.  Pointing to Edinburgh University’s centenary of women in legal education, Margaret spoke of the first two women to gain a postgraduate LLB in 1909 who both had legal profession links in their family, but who did not, and could not, enter into the profession.  The law society, at the time, decided to wait until the end of the Great War to see if they would have enough male members returning from the battle fields before considering whether to admit women – rather much a response to market forces than the emancipation of female lawyers!

Nevertheless, Margaret also indicated how some things have not changed – William Twining’s book Blackstone’s Tower relates a story where law students were directed to bring in a broadsheet newspaper and identify the items that had legal issues until the entirety of the paper had been considered – modern law students may well use electronic publications rather than the paper-copy but the learning experience remains the same.  Less positive is the lack of change in terms of funding for legal education.  Margaret made comparisons with medical practitioners, honorary NHS contracts and the general view that law is a professional subject that can be taught on a lower budget due to the absence of scientific labs etc.

Still to come, guest blog post from the Law Society of Scotland, and a review of the afternoon sessions!

The value of social media

This month's Big Question from Tony Carrer's Learning Circuits Blog is an interesting one, not just for learning professionals who are trying to enage colleagues, but also for academics who are trying to engage their students!

"How do I communicate the value of social media as a learning tool to my organization?"

"My coworkers are Baby Boomers and Traditionals. When I mention blogs or any social networking they "poo-poo" me and say our workers should not use those tools because it will make them inefficient and not do their jobs. When I have presented the idea of how we can use discussion threads on our environment to discuss topics and make comments outside the classroom, many of my co-workers said it can't be done. They either haven't opened their mind to the idea or really care. In essence, if it is not classroom, they are really not interested in it.

My question is how do I get my coworkers to even consider the capabilities of these tools when it really does not interest them."

In relation to higher education, and legal education in particular, I think that the uptake of social media by the profession can also be used as a driver to encouage staff to (re)consider using such tools in the classroom setting.

It may well be that the profession is also experiencing this 'Big Question' and that senior partners are poo-pooing tools that may be considered as an inefficient use of time, but recently the use of social media by both large and small firms has really taken off.

Writing for the Binary Law blog, Nick Holmes picks up on other commentators in thrall of the BigLaw firms, in particular whether the legal press pays a disproportionate amount of attention to large law firms - with their panoply of marketing directors, PR advisors, website and social media mavens.  His response to Jordan Furlong, a Canadian blogger at slaw.ca, was:

"I do think you’re not seeing the wood for the trees here. Social media do already provide the means for solos and smaller firms to leave a bigger footprint and “amplify their voice and multiply their narratives within the profession as a whole”. As you well know, they are doing it through public blogging and the public SNEs; and the pooling and focussing is done via public group activity on group blogs and special interest groups on the SNEs.

That does not provide a complete solution and third party collaboration and aggregation channels are evolving, but I don’t really see that they need “their own media channel” – will it not be an agglomeration of media channels?

The first step for solos and small firms is to engage with social media and they have only themselves to blame if they don’t.

You suggest that their footprints need to be left “in the places where journalists search for ideas and leads”. Turn that around: how about journalists need to engage better with social media and source their stories from a wider range of media channels? Surely it’s a very lazy hack who relies on the mainstream legal media for their ideas; surely they need to be reading blogs, following Twitter et al? Now I know you do this, so the next question to ask (of an employed journalist) is – It’s all very well for me to source some of my ideas and stories from solos and small firms, but will that sell the rag/will it attract the advertising bucks, will it please my paymaster? I suspect the answer to those questions is No."

In a previous post, Holmes also points to a critique of Susskind's book, The End of Lawyers? reviewed by Gillian Bull, which further contributes to the notion of BigLaw:

“Susskind’s book in the main deals with life on Planet Mammon: life on Planet Rumpole (or even Planet Pooter) doesn’t figure much.” Thus, in her view, the book is not relevant to most lawyers and the public at large. Not only that, but City lawyers either won’t need to read it if they’re already on the game, or won’t want to read it if they’re not; and their ICT managers will “need more than the collection of anecdotes and predictions that this book comprises. To make their case for spending money they need lots of hard data, of which there are none here.”

But then, this book does focus on the large law firms and perhaps another book, or another author, could /should look further at small firms and the sole practitioner.

So, returning to the 'Big Question', then yes, both large and small firms are using social media and there may well be an expectation that future employees (our students) should be able to engage, contribute to, or even lead with this type of engagement.

The HEA in general, UKCLE in relation to legal education and individual HEIs all encouarge staff to undertake pilot projects and the sharing of examples which is probably our sector's solution to this Big Question, and has been for some time.  However, this does rely on the innovative lecturer to adopt or adapt the case studies for specific purposes on his or her course.

I was particularly drawn to an existing response to the Big Question that included the following presentation - a PR jobs-worth trying to ban the telephone in favour of social media!

New technology - the threat to our information

View more presentations from normanlamont.

Blawg Review: On blogs and 'accidental' legal education (teach your children well...)

This week, Blawg Review #232 is hosted by Susan Cartier Liebel at Solo Practice University on World Teachers' Day. Held annually on October 5th since 1994, World Teachers' Day commemorates teachers’ organisations worldwide. Its aim is to mobilise support for teachers and to ensure that the needs of future generations will continue to be met by teachers.

For those who don't know, Blawg Review is carnival blog that is hosted by guest bloggers using their own blog site to provide content of a (usually specialist) theme.  It usually has a technology / IPR / alternative slant and, in the main, hosted by US bloggers.  There have been UK and Irish hosts in the past, most notably BabyBarrista (TimesOnline), CharonQC (Mike Semple Piggot), Cearta (Eoin O'Dell) and Lex Ferenda (Daithi MacSigthi).

This, it would appear, is the first blawg review to focus on legal education specifically, yet does so in a way that illustrates the 'Accidental Educator':

"Who is the accidental educator? In this case, the lawyer, regardless the myriad motivations for doing so, who shares his or her expertise that benefits many through the ever-expanding world of the internet. The tweeter who tweets one article that helps another find invaluable life-saving information and who continues to do so often and in random fashion. The lawyer who condemns in the court of public opinion a rule of law which is just plain wrong. But for this forum it might go unnoticed by the majority, unheard and unexplained. The opinionated who challenges you to rethink your position. The provocateur who baits others to engage in a much needed public debate. They are all educators if they make you think. They are all educators if they challenge your ideas, your biases, your beliefs. If they create and promote the conversation, they educate. You don’t have to agree, but you listen."

Susan then reviews and celebrates some of the blawgosphere's educators - again, mainly US but this does introduce the reader to further niches: bicycle law?

Last week, Colin Miller updated a list of US ‘legal educator’ blogs, following on from Daniel Solove‘s earlier census reports which were restrictedly solely to law professors.  It can be found on the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) and downloaded here.

Whilst interesting to flick through, the organisation of this list is mainly by law school or blog title.  Some titles reflect the name of the blogger, such as Lessig Blog, or Brian Leiter's Law School Reports, others are plain subject titles such as the Mass Tort Litigation Blog, some might even be a collective effort from one particular institution: The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog.  Others, however, are less indicative of their content: Law Prof on the Loose!  What it does not do, is organise by field, subject or specialism – which might be of more use to those looking for a particular type of blog to read.

Miller does offer some stats on the (roughly) 60/40 male-to-female ratio for these bloggers, and that Harvard Law School leads the field with 23 bloggers on their faculty.  This does, as he observes, offer some “indication of where law schools stand in the blogosphere”, and it will be interesting to see if these observations change over time.  Interestingly, Harvard does not lead the table of ‘number of blogs on which educators at those schools post’.

In the light of Susan's comments on accidental educators, the authors of the blogs in the above list are clearly opining in one way or another, yet few comment on their approach to teaching.  Paul Maharg observed in his blog Zeugma that only one such blog focused on legal education as their primary theme: the Best Practices blog, maintained by Prof Mary Lynch and here are links to some of her recent posts:

So, what can we say about these legal bloggers?  Yes, they are giving an educational experience to the reader, but it is more than likely that the reader will be a fellow academic, a practicing lawyer,or other professional.  Less likely is that law students will read or engage with these blogs, other than perhaps blogs written by their own teaching staff. It might be interesting to consider whether bloggers are better at blogging an opinion or viewpoint than transmitting the same point whilst teaching a class.

Beyond Text in Legal Education

This has received quite a bit of attention lately, both Paul Maharg and Julian Webb have commented on the activities of the AHRC funded project at Edinburgh University that took place this past weekend.

Here are some links to the blog posts and the project in general:

Page for the two-day conference
hEaD space - Beyond Text – Day 1
Zeugma - Beyond Text Conference, 21-22 June, day one
Zeugma - Beyond Text Conference, 21-22 June, day two

Welcome to our World!

Whilst the joint UKCLE/Physical Sciences Centre event on law and forensic science teaching was free to attend, both Carole McCartney and John Cassella made us work for our lunch earlier today.  Over 40 delegates attended what was originally planned for 20, and still more were on the reserve list thus indicating that the level of interest.  An even split between law and science teachers brought a balance to the discussions.

Entitled ‘lowering the drawbridge : law and forensic science education in the 21st century’, the event was designed specifically to discuss what legal education forensic science students require, and what scientific training law students require.  These two bastions of academia may indeed lower their drawbridges for passing trade between the two disciplines, but at what cost, to what ends, and are there trolls beneath the bridges causing us concerns?

 

I felt it was a very productive day, not only to take stock of my own module’s content and style of delivery, but also to hear and reflect on the practice of others, both common and uncommon needs and barriers.  This confirmed the expected diversity (in terms of how much forensic science law students get, and vice versa) that Carole proposed in Directions (and which I blogged on the Scottish perspective) last year.

No doubt we have raised more questions than had to start with, and answered fewer of the original questions than we anticipated, but hopefully this will be the start of a process to engage the two disciplines and offer some introductions to each other’s worlds.

Not wishing to pre-empt the joint report that Carole and John will prepare (with the assistance of all those who attended – no easy task!) for the HEA subject centres, I shall simply leave you with a few recently published resources (by no means exhaustive) that were briefly noted:

Merlino et al (2008) Science in the Law School Curriculum: A Snapshot of the Legal Education Landscape, Journal of Legal Education, 58(2) 190-213

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS)(2009) Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward, in particular chapter 8.

Law Commission (2009) Expert Evidence in Criminal Trials

Time for some Google (and others) Bashing?

Heidi Schuster from the Max Planck Institute spoke about the use of Google in academic institutions (but also equally applicable to any corporate employer or government agency).Outsourcing of often undertaken by both the employer and the employee if software or services are not available in-house, so to speak.  However, this means that data is then transferred and stored on external servers – sometimes for free, but the real price that’s paid can be seen in Google’s terms of service that grant extensive rights for Google to ‘use’ this data.  Heidi pointed out that this is not unique to Google, but the services offered by Google are increasingly taken-up by academics and their institutions.  Many universities outsource their student email (although not usually staff email) if only to save on server space and bandwidth.  The presentation also looked at the issue of Google Inc having their headquarters in the US – i.e. outwith the EU and beyond the jurisdiction of the data protection legislation applicable to member states.  The EU’s Safe Harbour List offers some solace for Google users, but may not for users of other services.

The presentation made me think about my own use of Google – with echoes of the keynote speaker’s comments on the convergence of several great (or not quite so great, but certainly useful) functions and services.

Gmail – an alternative email address (but I’d stop short of having my university mail forwarded there).

Google Docs – collaborating with co-applicants and authors; and as (yet another!) obsessive-compulsive back-up, which probably isn’t such a good idea, but goes alongside the USB, CD, email a copy (to gmail? duh!) versions of anything I think I might accidentally delete or lose somehow.

Blogger – used for teaching and as a dissemination portal for some projects.

Google Analytics – let’s me know who’s reading this (and my other) blogs.

Google Talk – not used this for teaching (yet), but might be useful.

Google Groups – I tend to use the VLE rather than this for teaching, but it can offer some benefits.

Google Calendar – again, I don’t use it for teaching, but it’s great for collaboration with other institutions and for research projects.

Google Scholar – quite useful when I don’t really know what I’m looking for, and for when I’ve forgotten my Athens credentials!

Desktop search – this data doesn’t leave your machine, but it will if you wish to link multiple machines and perform only one search when all the indexing goes off to a Google server.

YouTube  – somewhere to stash various clips and other stuff so I can access them from anywhere (usually for a last minute conference presentation alteration).

Picassa – Similar to Flickr in the sense of somewhere to stash photos for last minute conference presentation alterations!

A cautionary tale, but nevertheless reminded me of how much I use one service provider.  My only defence is that I was using other service providers until Google bought them, that some services are specialised and I don’t have alternative choices, and finally the lazy option of the convenience – I don’t need to register elsewhere for a similar service.

A CLEA view from Hong Kong

The Commonwealth Legal Education Association’s conference takes place every two years, and this year CLEA was in Hong Kong at the City University.  The weather wasn’t particularly clear, but the conference certainly was!  The Dean of the Law School opened with a quote that ‘to educate a student is to educate an individual; educate a teacher and you educate a community’.  The Chief Judge of the High Court (Justice Geoffrey Ma) then spoke about how a legal education should be akin to the ‘pursuit of the unattainable’ in the sense that when the law is not clear, predictable or easily applied, then a lawyer should have a guiding instinct.  The source of his presentation arises from a House of Lords judgment by Lord Goff in Spiliada Maritime Corporation v. Cansulex Ltd:

‘‘[J]urists are pilgrims with us on the endless road to unattainable perfection; and we have it on the excellent authority of Geoffrey Chaucer that conversations among pilgrims can be most rewarding”.

Following my own presentation about online learning in a commonwealth context, I was pleased and surprised to see a Second Life presentation from Angel Adrian (Bournemouth) and Clare Chambers (UWE).  They have been using virtual worlds to support their teaching and label their students as the X-Box generation – a term subsequently adopted by the conference whole-heartedly as much interest was sparked in the field of alternative delivery methods.  The attributes (which I failed to note all) of this x-box generation include arrogance, competitiveness, and other qualities not necessarily seen in abundance for previous generations.

Michael Furmston (Singapore Management Univ) presented ‘some problems with assessment’ and brought up the topic of cricket (again, a recurrent conference theme!) players, chess masters, American presidents and judges – the reason being, how can we rate their skills and can we apply such a method to students?

Categorisation is a rather easy task – most academics can quite easily spot an essay worth a first, 2.1, 2.2 and a third.  Many will also be able to say whether an essay is a good or weak example of each category, but when we take a greater number of categories (i.e. 1 to 100) it is less of an easy task.  Whilst Michael was speaking, I was reminded of a SWAP workshop last year run by the HEA with Richard Kimbell (see a previous blog post) who discussed a comparative pairs methodology.  Indeed, Michael went on to discuss a similar method being used to grade American presidents – Lincoln came top of the list consistently in a variety of different polls.  However, Washington and G. Roosevelt varied as to whether they came second or third.  A comparative pairs methodology would give more than just an ordinal ranking – it would indicate just how far ahead Lincoln is above the contestants for second and third place, who are almost on a par.  The best, and the worse US Supreme Court Justices were easily identified by a team of voters with knowledge of the legal system – the ones in the middle were less easily and more inconsistently delineated by individuals.  For those who need to know, the top cricketer was consistently named as Donald Bradman.

The take-home message, I suppose, is does it matter that the standard in one year is different to the next?  Or, whether one university differs to another or even subjects differ in standards?  If it does matter – what can we do, and what are we doing about it?

Swethaa Ballakrishnen (Harvard) offered some interesting points from her research into the evolution of South Asian legal education.  The relatively recent National Law Schools (5 year degrees with highly competitive entry) are embarking on a reversal of previously defective rote learning and weak legal education.    Swethaa noted that pre-independence, many lawyers educated in India were taught by professors educated in Britain, and indeed, many post independence statesmen held law degrees, although may not have practiced.  Arguably unfair, this new five year degree does promote a competitive edge for candidates early in their educational career.  It creates an elite degree, which is perhaps warranted in a legal system that offers automatic entry to the bar once qualified: there is no differentiation between solicitors/lawyers and advocates/barristers.  The presentation also covered issues regarding the syllabus; it appears that it is not perhaps what law to teach, but rather teaching law differently that is required.

Michael Sayers, the secretary-general of the Commonwealth Association of Law Reform Agencies (www.calras.org) spoke about the work of this association in over sixty different jurisdictions.  Current broad topics being addressed or reviewed across the Commonwealth include issues relating to science and technology, climate and ecology, and aging.  Many other types of reviews exist of course, but these appear to be a global trend.  Michael suggested that academics not only fit the bill for potential law commissioners, but they are equally well equipped in relation to four other ‘C’s:

Consultees – this is relatively common, especially for green papers.  Positive (as opposed to just negative) comments are equally desirable and of use to commissions, yet often forgotten about.

Communicators – academics are, apparently, good at getting the point across.  I’m pleased that commissions think so!  They naturally do so in both teaching and research.

Consultants – often commissions are in need of either paid or unpaid specialist input.  Academics may often have the time and resources to assist, and this form of external engagement is of benefit to the law schools and universities in general.

                Commitment – teaching a curriculum keeps an academic up-to-date.

This presentation reminded me of someone’s suggestion (my apologies for forgetting who!) at a UKCLE event.  Michael asked at the start of his presentation, who had responded to various types of consultation documents as an academic.  I recall a suggestion that current consultations (or even old ones) could be used as a class exercise to draft a response: it could even (and perhaps should) be sent as a response.  The only draw-back is that I doubt, even with sixty jurisdictions, that there would be a convenient consultation every semester A to coincide with land law (for example).  Indeed, older ones could be used repeatedly and might even be worth assessing, but a constitutional law module could make use of any consultation in terms of process and the right to respond etc.  Student law societies could even do so outwith the curriculum.

My final review is a presentation from Selina Goulbourne (Holborn College) who spoke about a review of Islamic law teaching in conjunction with the UKCLE (see link and also here).  As with Swethaa’s presentation, Selina criticised the use of rote learning as it does not encourage the student to see the law in context, or perhaps fully understand the principles of the law.  Selina is looking at undergraduate and professional education and making comparative analysis of jurisdictions with and without an Islamic tradition.  Also mentioned was the potential difficulty with the translation of Arabic texts in non-Arabic speaking states such as Malaysia.

Axing lectures, and April fools...

At first, I was highly tempted to reproduce this as a timely, seasonal shaggy-dog story - Law Students Demonstrate For More Lectures !  Given that SolicitR is self-defined as 'supriously legal' I did have my doubts - Julie Henry (education correspondent) also ran with this on the same date in the Telegraph - the Mirror was a full day early, but I was less cynical when the Manchester Evening News ran a u-turn story a few days later!

"With all the demonstrations going on in the run up to the G20, this one might just have slipped a little under the radar. Manchester law students recently marched on the office of Professor Alan Gilbert, president of Manchester University, to protest about cuts to their law degree course after being told that their lectures will be reduced from 30 hours a term to just 20 hours from next year."

Google News was excedingly unhelpful in my quest to seek whether "I'd been 'ad" or not.
Eitherway, given that cut-backs and other factors may be drivers for reduced contact time, can e-learning and blended learning assist?  Many argue that e-learning is time intensive to set-up (and I agree), and depepnding on how it is delivered, it may even be intensive to manage at various or all parts of the teaching period.  But, I have made cuts to contact time and now that my e-learning projects are reasonably established, I'm not spending all of the 'time saved' on the PC.  Students, on the otherhand, have mixed responses although in general they fare well.  Instead of using the term 'digital natives' I think that 'digitally naive' might be more apt as they are not incapable but perhaps less able to just pick-up and run with new technologies as one might expect with the class-bsaed lecture/seminar model.
Perhaps this is more of an issue for the law curriculum...
Google News was more helpful in finding reports of Second Life and other such things in higher education, with neighbouring MMU film and media students enjoying all bar two lectures for a particular module being delivered online.  This appears to be both substantive issues and practical skills (opening a business and advertising), yet perhaps the stakes aren't so high compared to a professsional degree where marks count for access to level two training and accreditiation.  But, I don't want to use that as an argument for not using alternative learning methods, it's merely reason to ensure that the student is able to engage and that supports are in place.  That isn't easy either!
I should also point out that Manchester's response is that any lectures cut would be replaced by tutorials and other teacher-led activities.

"In the case of law, we'd want more face-to-face time with tutors or in a training court room, rather than the `talking head' environment of a lecture."

Perhaps this will be more effective (although more reliant on physical spaces) than a Second Life courtroom...