scholarly journals New skills for the 21st century lawyer students

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Schad Bergsaker ◽  
Hilde Westbye ◽  
Andrea Gasparini

For the future lawyer digital skills will become valuable, but at the moment there are few opportunities to acquire advanced digital skills through the master’s of law programme at the University of Oslo. One new elective course, “Legal Technology: Artificial Intelligence and Law”, have experimented on how different advanced skillsets can be achieved in a short period of time. In this paper we present our findings and experiences when library and technical staff from the University of Oslo worked together with the Faculty of Law, in developing a non-mandatory law-AI boot-camp.The AI boot-camp had six lectures and workshops and gave a practical view on AI and technological skills. Three lessons on python were given by the company Synch Law1 and library staff. The library gave the second lesson on python trying out a carpentry approach. There was also one workshop about Design Thinking (Brown, 2009) given by the library, and Microsoft gave one lecture about AI and the Azure platform. The last lesson was about digital mentoring held by one of the course tutors.The library had already worked on the use of AI at the University (Gasparini et al., 2018), but not in the context of legal education. By challenging the law students with different innovative practices, we observed that a deeper understanding of AI and technological skills emerged. The law students became more creative when they were exposed to multidisciplinary methods (Seidel & Fixson, 2013).Our findings support the new role the library can have as a partner when new forms of learning and knowledge are created. The library possesses a range of new competencies needed at the University. However, there should be more cross departmental collaboration.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (21) ◽  
pp. 11890
Author(s):  
Sanita Baranova ◽  
Dita Nīmante ◽  
Daiga Kalniņa ◽  
Alise Oļesika

In Spring 2020, due to the rapid spread of COVID-19, all educational institutions in Latvia, including the University of Latvia (UL), transitioned from face-to-face on-site learning to remote learning. After a short period of face-to-face on-site learning in autumn, UL returned to remote learning in November for the second time. This paper investigates the UL students’ perspectives on remote teaching and learning at the UL during the first and second COVID-19 periods. The research assesses several remote study organization aspects, including the lecturer’s and student’s digital skills, their access to information and support during the study process, planning and implementation of the study process, and students’ acquisition of the content. The study used an original questionnaire designed in the Spring 2020 semester. Seven questions from the first questionnaire were included in another follow-up questionnaire distributed in the Spring 2021 semester. A total of 2248 UL students from the Spring 2020 semester and 742 students from the Spring 2021 semester participated in the study, representing 13 faculties across all study levels. The survey responses were collected via a QuestionPro survey platform and then downloaded into an IBM SPSS 28 file for a reliability check. Next, descriptive statistical analyses were conducted for each reported survey item using Microsoft Excel 2016. The research presented here implies that, in general, students perceive positive improvements in almost all the investigated aspects of the organization of the remote study process when comparing the first and second COVID-19 periods, which could indicate a certain level of resilience in students and university lecturers when subject to COVID circumstances. However, the results reveal that students have, in one year, developed a more realistic approach in assessing their digital skills. The results lead us to believe that remote on-line learning is not just a short-term solution but could become a valuable element for providing qualitative education in the long term. It could indicate that the students and lecturers at university are ready for new and sustainable higher education study organization solutions in the future.


2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-578
Author(s):  
Bruce A. Kimball

Between 1915 and 1925, Harvard University conducted the first national public fund-raising campaign in higher education in the United States. At the same time, Harvard Law School attempted the first such effort in legal education. The law school organized its effort independently, in conjunction with its centennial in 1917. The university campaign succeeded magnificently by all accounts; the law school failed miserably. Though perfectly positioned for this new venture, Harvard Law School raised scarcely a quarter of its goal from merely 2 percent of its alumni. This essay presents the first account of this campaign and argues that its failure was rooted in longstanding cultural and professional objections that many of the school's alumni shared: law students and law schools neither need nor deserve benefactions, and such gifts worsen the overcrowding of the bar. Due to these objections, lethargy, apathy, and pessimism suffused the campaign. These factors weakened the leadership of the alumni association, the dean, and the president, leading to inept management, wasted time, and an unlikely strategy that was pursued ineffectively. All this doomed the campaign, particularly given the tragic interruptions of the dean's suicide and World War I, along with competition from the well-run campaigns for the University and for disaster relief due to the war.


1921 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. E. Scrutton

During the last Long Vacation—which I am afraid, by the way, will be the last long vacation—I Was just about starting out to indulge in a pastime which a don of the rival, but much inferior, university has described as “putting little balls into little holes with instruments singularly unadapted for the purpose” when a letter was put into my hand with an American stamp and a United States postmark. I opened it hastily and glanced at it, and gathered the impression that some unknown society in the United States was inviting me to proceed there in the month of November to deliver an address on some legal subject. I was flattered and puzzled. I threw the letter on the table and went out to indulge in the aforesaid pastime. It was not till I got home and read the letter carefully that I discovered what it was all about. I gathered that your Downing Professor, who prefers to spend his holiday in a dry climate—a bone-dry climate—was conveying to me the request of the University Law Society that I should come back to my old university and my old college and speak to the law students, and I was very much flattered and grateful. I felt a little, however, like the Prodigal Son, for I thought that for the Cambridge Law Society and the Law School of Cambridge to invite a man who had paid little attention to them while he was up, to come and address them, was heaping coals of fire upon his head.


Author(s):  
Willem Hendrik Gravett

It is a sad fact that at most university law schools in South Africa, a student can graduate without ever having set foot in a courtroom, and without ever having spoken to, or on behalf of, a person in need of advice or counsel. The past several years have witnessed a swelling chorus of complaints that the current LLB curriculum produces law graduates who were "out of their depth" in practice. My purpose is to make a case for the inclusion in the LLB curriculum of a course in trial advocacy. This endeavour of necessity invokes the broader debate over the educational objectives of a university law school – a debate memorably framed by William Twining as the two polar images of "Pericles and the plumber". My thesis is that the education of practising lawyers should be the primary mission of the university law school. The first part of this contribution is a response to those legal academics who hold that the role of the law school is to educate law students in the theories and substance of the law; that it is not to function as a trade school or a nursery school for legal practice. With reference to the development of legal education in the United States, I argue that the "education/training" dichotomy has been exposed as a red herring. This so-called antithesis is false, because it assumes that a vocational approach is necessarily incompatible with such values as free inquiry, intellectual rigour, independence of thought, and breadth of perspective. The modern American law school has shown that such so-called incompatibility is the product of intellectual snobbery and devoid of any substance. It is also often said that the raison d'être of a university legal education is to develop in the law student the ability "to think like a lawyer". However, what legal academics usually mean by "thinking like a lawyer" is the development of a limited subset of the skills that are of crucial importance in practising law: one fundamental cognitive skill – analysis – and one fundamental applied skill – legal research. We are not preparing our students for other, equally crucial lawyering tasks – negotiating, client counselling, witness interviewing and trial advocacy. Thinking like a lawyer is a much richer and more intricate process than merely collecting and manipulating doctrine. We cannot say that we are fulfilling our goal to teach students to "think like lawyers", because the complete lawyer "thinks" about doctrine and about trial strategy and about negotiation and about counselling. We cannot teach students to "think like lawyers" without simultaneously teaching them what lawyers do. An LLB curriculum that only produces graduates who can "think like lawyers" in the narrow sense ill-serves them, the profession and the public. If the profession is to improve the quality of the services it provides to the public, it is necessary for the law schools to recognise that their students must receive the skills needed to put into practice the knowledge and analytical abilities they learn in the substantive courses. We have an obligation to balance the LLB curriculum with courses in professional competence, including trial advocacy – courses that expose our students to what actually occurs in lawyer-client relationships and in courtrooms. The skills our law students would acquire in these courses are essential to graduating minimally-competent lawyers whom we can hand over to practice to complete their training. The university law school must help students form the habits and skills that will carry over to a lifetime of practice. Nothing could be more absurd than to neglect in education those practical matters that are necessary for a person's future calling.


2014 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 761
Author(s):  
Rosalie Jukier ◽  
Kate Glover

In this article, the authors argue that the longstanding trend of excluding graduate studies in law from the discourse on legal education has detrimental effects on both the discourse and the future of the law faculty. More specifically, disregarding graduate legal education is at odds with the reality of graduate studies in Canadian law faculties today, ignores the challenges of graduate programs in law, and perpetuates inaccurate distinctions about both the career aspirations of law students and the relationship between undergraduate and graduate legal studies. In the authors’ view, these concerns can be overcome by reframing the discourse. Once the purpose of legal education is understood to be the cultivation of jurists and the law faculty is seen as an integrated whole of people, place, and program, graduate legal education moves easily into the discussion on the future of the law faculty. Including graduate studies in the discourse is an opportunity to explore, and be hopeful about, the institutional missions of law faculties and their place in the university, the optimization of legal education at all levels, and the methods by which participants in graduate studies should fulfill their responsibilities to the future of the discipline.


Author(s):  
О. В. Бойко

The scientific article identifies the peculiarities of appealing the decisions, actions or omissions of public administration subjects on the provision of public services at the stage of initiation and preparation for judicial review of an administrative case. The author substantiates the feasibility of improving the legal regulation of the procedure for holding a preliminary hearing before the court hearing of the case. In particular, it is considered expedient to set the terms of the preparatory meeting from the moment of receipt of the administrative claim, as well as to determine the cases when the parties are not reconciled.It is established that the preliminary stage of the court hearing often ends with the conclusion of the preliminary proceedings and the appointment of the case to trial in the field of public services. This is not against the law. However, it should be borne in mind that in accordance with Art. 121 of the CAS of Ukraine such a decision is delivered by the consequences of preparatory proceedings, not the previous court hearing. Obviously, preparatory proceedings are not limited to, and do not always end at, a previous court hearing. Preparation may continue after a preliminary hearing. Therefore, the decision to close the preliminary proceedings and assign the case to trial after the consequences of the previous court hearing can only be made if the judge has taken all the measures necessary to hear the case. If during a previous court hearing in the field of public services, to which all persons involved in the case have arrived, the issues necessary for its consideration have been resolved, then, with the written consent of these persons, a court hearing may be initiated on the same day. In this case, the termination order is also delivered.


Author(s):  
Robert Garner ◽  
Yewande Okuleye

This book is an account of the life and times of a loose friendship group (later christened the Oxford Group) of ten people, primarily postgraduate philosophy students, who attended the University of Oxford for a short period of time from the late 1960s. The Oxford Group, which included—most notably—Peter Singer and Richard Ryder, set about thinking about, talking about, and promoting the idea of animal rights and vegetarianism. The group therefore played a role, largely undocumented and unacknowledged, in the emergence of the animal rights movement and the discipline of animal ethics. Most notably, the group produced an edited collection of articles published as Animals, Men and Morals in 1971 that was instrumental in one of their number—Peter Singer—writing Animal Liberation in 1975, a book that has had an extraordinary influence in the intervening years. The book serves as a case study of how the emergence of important work and the development of new ideas can be explained, and, in particular, how far the intellectual development of individuals is influenced by their participation in a creative community.


Author(s):  
Ruchi Ram Sahni

In this chapter Ruchi Ram Sahni recounts what he calls the most depressing and unpleasant incident of his life. It involved his supersession for the position of Professor-in-Charge of the Chemistry Department at the Government College, Lahore, by a much younger Englishman, fresh from university. The post in question was vacated by an English colleague, a Senior Professor, with whom the author had a difficult relationship involving a dispute about who was to be selected for the post of Examiner in the university examinations. This colleague went on to write a secret report against Sahni, resulting in his supersession despite his vast seniority. Sahni relates the psychological trauma resulting from this experience, and its contribution to strengthen his resolve to leave Lahore for a short period to do research in Europe.


1931 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 700-703
Author(s):  
Joseph S. Roucek

The law for the reorganization of central administration and the law on local administration (July 20, 1929) sponsored by the National Peasant government of Roumania have recently been put into effect. Both measures were drafted by Professors Negulescu, of the University of Bucharest, and Alexianu, of the University of Cernauţi. Their adoption comprises one of the most thorough governmental reforms in the history of the Balkans.The structure of the Roumanian government was, until very recently, almost completely copied from the French system. Roumania was a typical example of a unitary organization. The whole power of government was centralized in Bucharest. Practically all powers of local government were derived from the central authority, and were enlarged and contracted at the will of Bucharest. The whole system lent itself admirably to the domination of the National Liberal party, guided up to 1927 by Ion I. C. Brǎtianu, and after his death by his brother, Vintilǎ I. C. Brǎtianu, who died last year.Since the strength of the National Peasant party, which assumed the reins in 1928, lies largely in the provinces acquired at the close of the World War, a decentralization of government was to be expected. The bitter resentment of Maniu and his associates toward the over-centralization which favored the policies of the Bratianus forced the recent overhauling of the governmental structure, tending toward federalism—a form which takes cognizance of the differences of the past and present between the old kingdom and the new provinces and attempts to extend democratic features of self-rule to the electorate. At the same time, it attempts to secure bureaucratic expertness.


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