Legal Training

Perhaps the most important question for legal educators is whether particular aspects of legal education are more valuable than others for lawyers in various activities. To answer this question we need to know more about what legally trained people do. What are they doing? How do their legal skills help them in their roles as attorneys, judges, corporation executives, owners of businesses, stockbrokers, union officers or government officials? Is there something about legal training which is an advantage to people, even if they do not practice law? The research project described in this article attempted to determine the activities of the legally trained, the use to which they put their legal skills, and their views of the utility of various aspects of their legal training. In order to understand the relevance of legal training to the roles and duties of practicing and non-practicing legally trained persons, we need to make some sense out of the variety of their activities. To do this we need several kinds of information. First, we need an account of their activities, that is, what they do, and an idea of which activities are most important. Second, we need to assess the opinions of legally-trained people about the relevance of certain aspects of their legal training to their professional and non-professional activities. Third, we need to know the essential skills they use in their work. To meet the needs for information about legal and nonlegal activities of legally-trained people, a review of relevant literature was conducted. Building on the results of these studies, a survey of a sample of 1,600 legallytrained persons from six law schools and three career stages (the classes of 1955, 1965, and 1970) was conducted. The survey provided information about legally-trained people's occupations, the extent of their legal and nonlegal activities, the skills they used in their work, and their perception of the value of their legal training in their activities. This article first describes the earlier studies of lawyers' opinions of the role of their legal educations in their careers. Then the sample and survey used in this study are described. The general results concerning alumni professional employment, areas of legal practice, and views of the importance of general knowledge and skills in their work are described in the following section. The results for groups of lawyers pursuing different kinds of careers ( e . g., solo practitioners, practitioners in large firms, legal educators, etc.) are explored in the next section. The results were also analyzed in other ways to compare groups of special interest. These analyses compare the careers and views of men and women law school alumni, of alumni at different stages of their careers, of alumni who had attended law school part-time and full-time and of alumni who had different academic records in law school. Finally, the implications of the study are discussed.

Founded on a prosopographical analysis of the European Commission¹s top civil servants, this paper gathers data in order to contribute to the analysis of the European legal capital in two ways. First, we show that while jurists (i.e. agents for whom law was the main element of their training) integrated the European Commission administration very early on, and acquired dominant positions, they were strong only insofar as their legal training was the basis of a broader undertaking of construction and acquisition of a more general bureaucratic capital. Secondly, we demonstrate that this ability to hold dominant positions within the machine tends to be increasingly contested with the rise of other agents, especially economists, whose properties tend to become indispensable for a high level career within the European Commission.

7 he decline of public confidence experienced by various professional groups in the United States is vividly represented by the sharp criticism which has recently been directed against the legal profession.' One aspect of this criticism is concern over the possible undue influence of lawyers on public policy. This concern has been explored in a variety of contexts. Studies of the impact of lawyers on policy formation and policy content have included analyses of the relationship between legal training and participation in public office, particularly elected office, the influence of legal background on legislative decision making and the values, behavior, and experiences of lawyers in non-legislative institutional settings.2 Other studies have focused on the impact of the law school experience in socializing law students and analyzing the possible consequences of such socialization for government policy making.3 These latter studies have suffered from a number of weaknesses, among which have been a non-quantitative and anecdotal approach, or a tendency to overgeneralize from law students at a single institution. Additionally, these studies have generally failed to consider possible distinctions between lawyers in government who are primarily engaged in litigatory activity and those who are functioning in capacities other than strictly "as lawyers." Finally, studies of lawyers in non-elective positions have not attempted to compare lawyers in influential policy positions with executives of other backgrounds in similar positions. Due to these omissions and weaknesses, questions concerning the alleged effect of lawyers on government policy making are far from resolved. This paper investigates the supposed policy influence of executives with legal backgrounds in the higher federal civil service. The first section of the paper discusses some of the arguments which support the assertion that lawyers in government have undue policy influence. The following sections bring empirical data to bear on these arguments.

After canvassing the history of, and rationale for, legal training reform, the article examines the recommendations of the Justice System Reform Council. It then examines some of the forces that led to the reforms; some of the forces that helped shape the reforms; and the major aspects of the reforms themselves. The second half of the article undertakes an initial assessment of the first year of operation of the new system, focusing on the University of Tokyo, and based upon the author's first-hand experience.

There is an uneasy relationship between the rigid classification of legal doctrines and the increasing market demand for adaptable legal thinking. To help reconcile this stress point, this article proposes placing more emphasis on “legal principles” as a tool in modern legal training. First, it shows the “portable” quality of legal principles by focusing on their common presence across doctrines, jurisdictions and legal professions. Second, it draws on the “cognitive theory of expertise” in order to show that lawyers think by “chunking” their knowledge at various levels of abstraction, and that each “legal principle” falls somewhere along this continuum of chunking. As a result, legal principles can have their own classification system, similar to existing doctrinal classifications but more practical in today’s competitive world due to their “portable” nature.

In Australia, applicants for admission to the legal profession must hold appropriate academic qualifications, and competently complete practical legal training (PLT). The author’s research investigates institutional PLT practitioners’ engagement with scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). The theoretical framework for the research draws on Bourdieu and Passeron’s reflexive sociology of education and culture. This article focuses on responses to a paramount obligation proposition put to 34 PLT practitioners during semi-structured interviews: “Might lawyers’ paramount obligations to the court intersect with PLT practitioners’ teaching and assessment practices?” The proposition elicited responses and insights about field forces within the individual and organisational dimensions of teaching and learning in PLT. These include top-down/bottom-up pressures that impinge on PLT practitioners’ engagement with SoTL.

This article reports on exploratory practitioner research conducted at a practical legal training college in 2011, which sought to identify the major factors associated with student satisfaction with online discussion forums as a medium for teaching and learning in practical legal training.

Abstract The article examines the nature of contemporary legal training in two French elite higher education institutions – one dedicated to prepare for legal careers in the economic field, the other one to train top civil servants – in order to assess the role of legal knowledge in the shaping of French contemporary elites. Based on observations of law classes in these schools, it sheds light on the kind of knowledge, skills, and values transmitted through this education. The article shows that in both schools law is presented as a major tool of power, which reinforces its traditional place as governing knowledge. This goes along with the promotion of an instrumental vision of the law, encouraging playing with the law to serve political and financial goals. In this regard, these schools elude the traditional French conception of law as a self-sufficient, coercive and neutral system of positive norms. Though observations show that this move away from French patterns is not fully accomplished in the schools, the promotion of law as a means to profitability and efficiency favours a convergence in the modes of thinking of both economic and administrative elites.

Over the past decade, there has been an increasing use of on-line learning tools and strategies in pre-admission practical legal training (PLT) programs. Where once on-line learning may have been regarded as experimental novelty in these programs, it has now become an indispensable adjunct to traditional methods of practical instruction. Although the rapid development and implementation of on-line learning may present difficulties when adopted indiscriminately, it also presents opportunities to develop thoughtful learning environments which use a range of learning techniques that appeal to a range of students and meet a variety of learning needs. This paper will explore the intersection of online learning tools and practices and traditional face-to face teaching and learning models in two PLT programs. In doing so, the paper will consider how online learning has changed each PLT program and how these programs have sought to balance the different approaches to teaching and learning.

With relatives displaced from their homes and a fiancee who was arbitrarily imprisoned and abused in Darfur, Hayat comes to her work with victims in the refugee camps with a personal stake. ... This commitment to human rights defense and victims’ advocacy led Hanifa and eight of his Sudanese colleagues to the Darfur Legal Training Program (the “Program”), a first-of-its-kind seminar in June of 2007 led by the American Bar Association Litigation Section (the ”Section”), with funding from the MacArthur Foundation. ... The Program brought these lawyers to London for a week to train with a faculty of American trial lawyers and representatives of the International Criminal Court (”ICC”) on advocacy skills, victims’ rights and resources, and international human rights law. ... The Sudanese lawyers now look to the ICC to administer justice on behalf of the Darfur victims, but they question if the Court can redress the millions of crimes that have occurred in Darfur–a concern highlighted by the ICC Prosecutor’s initial indictment, which accused only two defendants of crimes alleged to have occurred in four villages. ... Even recognizing the limitations of the ICC and the Sudanese legal system, however, the Sudanese lawyers are unwavering in their position that justice must be delivered to all of the Darfur victims, and the crimes against those victims must be acknowledged before there can be reconciliation in the Sudan. ... The participants in the Darfur Legal Training Program were men and women lawyers from throughout Sudan–all of whom have joined Salih in dedicating their careers to defending victims and challenging government oppression and atrocities. ... The Darfur Legal Training Program was designed to meet this specific need, by forging an unprecedented connection between those lawyers working on the ground in Sudan with Darfur victims, and the institution tasked with the investigation and prosecution of crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur. ... In story after story, the Sudanese lawyers shared the futility and tragic similarities of their repeated efforts on behalf of Darfur rape victims in the Sudan: each case brought on behalf of victims was quickly defeated as a result of government pressure.