Law Discipline Attributes

LAW AS A DISCIPLINE
 Law, in contemporary Western societies such as Australia, is
formally an autonomous discipline. This means that, while our law
may be affected by morality, or politics, or religion, it is separate
from them.
-For example, we may have a law against murder, but the
basis for that law is found in cases and legislation, not in the Bible
or the Ten Commandments, the Qur’an or the hadiths, the Sutras,
the Vedas or the Torah.
 Thus, this secular system is different from religious systems of law,
where the holy text is also the text of the law.
-For example, the basis of Shari’ah law, which applies in
some countries between Muslims, is the Qur’an itself.
Contd……
 A benefit of law being treated as an autonomous discipline is
that one legal system applies to all people in a country, from
many different backgrounds and religions.
- For example, someone who has not studied law
may immediately conclude, as a matter of opinion, that a
person who kills a child should be ‘imprisoned’ as
‘punishment’ for a ‘crime’.
 However, a legal thinker resists reaching these direct
conclusions, but instead follows a process of reasoning that
involves addressing whether the person has committed a
crime, considering the relevant legislation and its
interpretation, and then considering whether a punishment of
imprisonment is warranted and appropriate, and within the
scope of penalties provided in legislation.
 Applying a process of legal reasoning may result in a child
killer walking free, and this can be difficult for non-lawyers to
 HOW LAW IS DIFFERENT FROM OTHER DISCIPLINES
 Every discipline – be it law, science, arts or theology – has its own
style and way of thinking. Lawyers tend to throw around ideas in an
abstract manner, focusing more on the law and how it could be
applied to a particular problem or situation than on what that
application may actually mean for the lives and fortunes of those
involved.
 Sociologists tend to adopt a holistic approach to reasoning, always
bearing in mind the bigger picture, including predicted and
potential/ unpredicted consequences.
 Scientists and mathematicians seek a final answer from their
reasoning processes, and indeed when people with a science
background come to study law, they can often find it frustrating
that there may be several ‘correct’ answers to a legal problem – it is
all about the way you reason, not just the outcome that your
reasoning produces.
 Journalists focus on the stories of cases and their significance and
newsworthiness, and a student with a background in journalism
often writes a law essay like an article, usually with a ‘top’ that is
linked to the ‘tail’.
 A person with an arts background may throw in a quote from a
poem or famous person at the beginning or end, and engage in a fl
owing discussion of its relevance to the topic at hand.
Contd…….
 Law is different – it is a narrow, focused, succinct, judicious
and frill-free process of thinking and writing. There is no
flowery prose, there are no unsupportable presumptions.
There is no one ‘right’ conclusion and there is merit in arguing
both sides. At the same time, it is important to reach clear
conclusions.
 It can be infuriating for others that lawyers think everything
‘depends’ – which, of course, it does. But despite the law
being based on ‘abstract principles’, it is an applied discipline
that requires careful consideration of how the facts of a case
affect the legal outcome.
 In recent years there has been a shift away from purely legal
reasoning, and towards interdisciplinary approaches.
-This can, for example, involve the analysis of a
particular problem such as drink–driving from a legal and
sociological perspective; or consideration of sentencing from
Contd……
 There have been innovative steps taken in some law schools
where students from different disciplines have the opportunity
to work together in a clinic setting, assisting real clients in
trouble with the law in areas such as social work and financial
planning, as well as legal assistance.
 The proliferation of ‘double degree’ studies in Australia will also
help to create a generation of interdisciplinary thinkers.
PRIESTLEY 11
 In the early 1990s a committee chaired by the Honourable
Justice Priestley, comprising representatives from the various
state and territory admitting authorities, 2 held consultations on
what should be considered compulsory areas of study for all law
students in all undergraduate law courses in Australia. They
developed a list of 11 areas, which have become known as the
Priestley 11.
• They are: Constitutional Law, Criminal Law and Procedure,
Contracts, Torts, Administrative Law, Corporate Law, Property
Law, Equity and Trusts, Evidence, Civil Procedure and
Professional Conduct.
 LEGAL EDUCATION TO DATE: NATIONAL AND
INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
 The Australian Law Reform Commission in its recent report
Managing Justice – A Review of the Federal Civil Justice
System2 cited the American report Legal Education and
Professional Development – An Educational Continuum, and
concluded that legal education should be orientated around
“what lawyers need to be able to do”.
 This also reflects feedback from employers and graduates.
Nevertheless, the mainstream Australian educational focus
remains anchored in outmoded notions of “what lawyers
need to know”.
 Both the report released in 1987 by the Pearce Committee,
which examined legal education in Australia’s then law
schools,5 and the subsequent report by Craig McInnis and
Simon Marginson6 noted that movement toward skills
development within law schools has been slow and that,
crucially, there was no blueprint or taxonomy for the
development of skills programs.
Contd……
 The imperative to produce legal graduates with readily transferable
skills has been recognised at an international level, both in the
United States and in England.
-The Mac Crate Report examined and reviewed the status of
legal education in the United States. It formulated the following list
of fundamental lawyering skills and professional values and
recommended that all law schools aim to instil these within their
graduates:
• problem solving
• legal analysis and reasoning
• legal research
• factual investigation
• communication
• counselling
• negotiation
• litigation and alternative dispute resolution
• organisation and management of legal work
• recognising and resolving ethical dilemmas.8
Contd…….
 The MacCrate Report led a majority of US law schools to
redesign their curricula to entrench a clinical legal education
model for their law courses.
 An important element of each program is the focus on ethics
as an integral element of each of the substantive law units,
the emphasis being on exposure to real life problems and
issues in which ethical dilemmas are a large component.
 English universities have also been engaged in projects to
integrate the development of graduate or professional
attributes into undergraduate curricula in many disciplines,
including law.
 The UK Centre for Legal Education has undertaken several
projects of relevance to law. One is Benchmark Standards for
Law, another is General Transferable Skills in the Law
Curriculum. In both cases, the projects are prefaced on the
expectation that, in any discipline, students will go through
several changes of career in their working lives
Contd……
• The emphasis in tertiary studies should therefore focus on
developing students’ ability to transfer skills from one context to
another.
• The report on General Transferable Skills in the Law Curriculum
concluded that formal curricula were not addressing various skills
required by employers (for example, oral communication,
teamwork, written communication, leadership, personal drive and
commitment, and business awareness).
• Each of the universities within the United Kingdom networks has
addressed the issue of attributes and skills by:
 1. determining a university wide policy for the integration and
development of graduate attributes.
 2. setting out a list of abilities, skills and personal transferable skills
for each university
 3. considering the issues surrounding universities to ensure that
students achieve comparable experiences and standards of
ability.13
Contd…..
 The Benchmark Standards for Law repor details the areas and levels
of performance required of a law graduate, and identifies the
nature of general transferable skills developed through and
alongside specific legal skills to enable students to present their
learning achievements more effectively and in a wider employment
market.
 Australian universities are likewise concerned with the issue of
transferable graduate skills. The Australian Technology Network is
currently involved in a large teaching and learning project aimed at
designing a systematic and explicit strategy to cultivate and
evaluate the development of relevant generic attributes.
 The project recognises that, while universities may generally view
their graduates as having acquired certain implicit attributes, any
structured development of those attributes is either non-existent or
left to skills-based units divorced from the mainstream curriculum.
 The ATN Project suggests that generic attributes should be seen as
inextricably linked with the learning of disciplinary content in an
explicit rather than merely implicit manner.
 THE WHOLE OF UNIVERSITY APPROACH
In the past, universities have considered themselves to be
responsible only for the development of technical knowledge
and the inculcation of the graduate’s ability to be able to
criticise, question and search for justifications. However, it is
now apparent that universities should also be concerned to
ensure that their graduates are equipped with the skills
necessary to be able to use that technical knowledge
effectively in order to succeed in a global and ever-changing
workplace.
• Both the Australian ATN Project and the university networks
established in the United Kingdom encourage a systematic
approach to skills teaching within a discipline at university
level. Vital components of such an approach include:
 the identification of university-wide generic attributes
 the development of a framework for faculties to use to
 IS SKILLS INTEGRATION NECESSARY IN LAW?
• Overwhelmingly, contemporary educational thinking suggests
that universities should not be content to provide students
only with good technical knowledge: a university education
should also inculcate the skills necessary to utilise that
knowledge in an ever-changing global workplace.
-As the Australian Law Reform Commission
recommended,
… properly conceived and executed, professional skills training
should not be a narrow technical or vocational exercise …
rather it should be fully informed by theory, devoted to the
refinement of the high order intellectual skills of students,
and calculated to inculcate a sense of ethical propriety, and
professional and social responsibility.18
• The acceptance of this philosophy is becoming more
widespread in the general university community, as
evidenced, for example, by the ATN Project and the
international initiatives outlined earlier.
Contd…..
• Traditionally, lawyers and law teachers have been resistant to
change, claiming either that skills “training” is already
included within law courses or that specifically legal skills
(legal reasoning and problem solving, legal research) are more
important than generic skills (such as communication), which
may be acquired in other contexts.
• Legally specific skills, while important to private professional
practice, were not the most frequently used. The recent report
Employer Satisfaction with Graduate Skills commissioned by
the Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs
highlights skill deficiencies amongst graduates in the areas of
creativity and flair, communication skills, and problem solving.
Contd……
• It is of interest to note that Practical Legal Training (PLT) in
Australia is also undergoing a significant review at a national
level. The Australian Professional Legal Education Council
(APLEC) and the Priestley Committee are currently
reconsidering competency standards for pre-admission
training.
• Skills considered necessary in this context include personal
skills, client-relations, letter writing, drafting, interviewing and
communication skills, negotiation and dispute resolution,
problem solving, legal analysis, research, statutory
interpretation, and advocacy.
• The nature of the PLT competency standards is being
influenced by a belief that the PLT curriculum should be
designed to produce practitioners who are prepared to be
lifelong learners, rather than merely competent in particular
legal tasks at the time of admission to practice.
Contd……
• All of this highlights the critical issue of the responsibility law
courses should assume for teaching transferable generic skills. As
mentioned, many legal academics would say that they already
incorporate “skills” (whatever is meant by that term) within their
curriculum.

• While it is true that specific skills training is incorporated to a

generous extent within some law school curricula in specific skills
units (such as legal research, advocacy, negotiation), very few
substantive or core law units aim expressly to teach generic skills
such as communication, time management or computer skills.
• Nevertheless, the majority of legal academics would say that a skill
such as effective oral communication, for example, is obviously
necessary to successfully complete a law degree. The simultaneous
(though inconsistent) expectation is, however, that the student will
acquire the skill more by osmosis than by instruction.
• The solution to the mismatch between graduate preparation and
workplace demands lies in the acceptance that procedural
knowledge is just as important as conceptual knowledge and that a
curriculum which successfully integrates and fosters the