A forthcoming book chapter by Alex Steel (Univ. New South Wales), Imperatives for Legal Education: Then, Now and Tomorrow, surveys empirical studies focusing on various aspects of legal education in Australia. In so doing, the chapter also sheds indirect light on two other broader themes. One is the growing internationalization of empirical legal studies, broadly understood. A second is an increasingly self-conscious turn to submit legal education to rigorous empirical study. It is one thing for empirical legal scholars to explore legal theory, doctrine, and institutions from an empirical perspective. Deploying this perspective inward--and assessing whether and, if so, how, legal education achieves its various objectives--warrants note. On a related--though distinct--point, my sense is that the external shock imposed by the COVID-19 crisis and the near-universal (and simultaneous) reaction of U.S. law schools to turn to on-line instruction may provide quasi-experimental research design opportunities. The paper's abstract follows.
"Recent decades have seen a growing understanding that legal education can be improved and informed by empirical analysis of curriculum design, teaching approaches, student learning strategies and broader contextual factors. However, access to that analysis has been impeded by a lack of broad awareness of its existence and difficulty in locating publications.
This chapter provides a review of empirically based studies into Australian legal education from 2000–2017. The analysis demonstrates a significant rise in empirically based publications and an increasing sophistication with empirical methods. The chapter highlights trends in subjects examined empirically, the most commonly used methods, and publications where such analyses are most commonly found.
In order to make this research more available, in appendixes the chapter also lists the full database of empirical legal research publications on which the analysis was based."
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