Centre for Legal Education

Liz Curran is Associate Professor, Clinical Legal Education and School Research Impact Lead. Liz’s research, evaluation, practice, and academic work leads to policy change, funding for community agencies and developments in good practice. Her work fosters organisational, collective, and individual reflective practice using evidence-based changes in practice to produce positive outcomes in service delivery. She teaches practical legal skills to prepare students for the realities and challenges ahead with a history of positive students’ feedback for her teaching approaches. She has a Graduate Diploma in education, Arts/Law Degree, Masters in Law, Certificate in Conflict Conferencing and Doctor of Juridical Science.

Liz has taught a wide range of legal topics including client interviewing, advocacy skills, negotiation skills, legal ethics and practice management and has considerable experience in clinical legal education.  She routinely conducts professional development for legal practitioners for a range of agencies across Australia and has made a number of submissions on legal education policy

Liz has researched and published widely in access to justice and in clinical legal education.  Her book Better Law for a Better World, published in 2021, includes chapters exploring practical legal education skills and experiential clinical learning including emerging multidisciplinary student clinics, reflective learning and clinical legal education.

You can find out more about Liz’ work here.

 

In June this year, as a Nottingham Trent University Senior Fellow, I facilitated three workshops/roundtables at Nottingham Law School. The overarching themes for the three workshops was around the imperatives for ‘New Approaches to Lawyering’, to better meet the needs of community into the future. Each session had a very different focus and participant group.

The first session examined health justice partnerships and multidisciplinary practice and law clinics, the second looked at alternatives to the sometimes-problematic adversarial system and the final workshop/roundtable examined the future of legal education.  Using a deliberative, democratic style, the sessions were designed to facilitate conversations so that participants could share insights, expertise, experience and ideas by way of facilitated conversation points and positioning in the most recent research and commissions of inquiry.

The workshops explored ways forward and canvassed problem-solving approaches and restorative practice and holistic and responsive client centred approaches. The impact of each workshop included actioning ideas for future action in the UK, including new cross sector collaborations and plans for change. These were recorded and have been shared amongst participants who formed the groups and they will no doubt come together in future exploring some of the initiatives that were suggested.

Many thanks to the Nottingham Law School (NLS), Centre for Legal Education and Nottingham Centre for Children, Young People and Families who hosted the event. To Professor Jane Ching and the NLS team who helped formulate and coordinate and note take the sessions and the Events Team.

Dr Liz Curran, Associate Professor, ANU School of Legal Practice, ANU College of Law

13 July 2018

Building collaborations locally -Applying a health justice partnerships model to law clinics (20th June)

This facilitated discussion by Dr Liz Curran of Australian National University will take place from 14.30 to 16.30 with post event informal discussion until 18.30.

The event will be of interest to those involved in clinical legal education but also to those in the advice, health and justice sectors.  Dr Curran will lead dialogue around the concept of multidisciplinary clinics to enhance student learning and to reach the socially excluded who trust community workers by allowing them to access legal advice through the health sector.  The objective of the event is to advance and build relationships and identify some actions with a view to broadening and operationalising relationships and modes of clinic interventions that might be useful.

The event is hosted by the Centre for Legal Education at Nottingham Law School and is free to attend.  Light refreshments will be available.  Places are limited so the organisers would appreciate it if anyone who has booked but is later unable to attend advises them of this so that the place can be released.

 

 

Alternative ways to approach legal problem solving and disputes to the adversarial process to seek justice (25th June)

This facilitated discussion by Dr Liz Curran of Australian National University will take place from 14.30 to 16.30 with post event informal discussion until 18.30.

The event will be of interest to academics and practitioners in the justice and conflict resolution sectors and particularly in family and domestic violence support, as well as those with a particular interest in problem-solving and restorative justice. Dr Curran will lead dialogue around alternative approaches to lawyering, including therapeutic, problem solving courts; neighbourhood justice centres, conflict conferencing, round table dialogue and facilitation; inquisitorial. It will focus on family law and areas of law that intersect with family law problems,  such as care and protection of children, family violence, self-representation, poverty flowing from separation and abuse that often emerge.

The objective of the event is to bring together a range of academics, professionals and practitioners to look at alternative options given recent universal acknowledgement of the harms, costs and complex processes of the adversarial system.  New approaches will be shared by experts in academia and practitioners that might be less problematic and traumatic for participants in the process. e.g. family law, institutional abuse, family violence and so on

The event is jointly hosted by the Nottingham Centre for Children, Young People and Families; and the Centre for Legal Education at Nottingham Law School and is free to attend.  Light refreshments will be available. Places are limited so the organisers would appreciate it if anyone who has booked but is later unable to attend advises them of this so that the place can be released.

 

New approaches to lawyering and the implications for legal education: equipping our students to meet the changing world (27th June)

This facilitated discussion by Dr Liz Curran of Australian National University will take place from 14.30 to 16.30 with post event informal discussion until 18.30.

The event will be of interest to students, academics, employers, regulators and professional bodies and careers advisors in the legal sector and in sectors where a legal background is an advantage. Dr Curran will encourage participants to share teaching experiences and innovations that meet the needs of students and move them into employability in the modern age.

The event is hosted by the Centre for Legal Education at Nottingham Law School and is free to attend.  Light refreshments will be available. Places are limited so the organisers would appreciate it if anyone who has booked but is later unable to attend advises them of this so that the place can be released.

It is probably fair to say that, after the years of lockdown and restrictions on travel and face to face meeting, we thought long and hard about how best to configure our 2022 biennial conference.  In the circumstances, we wanted to focus on the positives of creativity and on bringing colleagues and students together in community. Knowing that travel, and the costs of travel, remain impractical for many people, we wanted to benefit from the model of online session stripped across a week that we had adopted, perforce, in 2020, we decided to use that again.  However we also wanted to bring people together and to celebrate community.  With the generous support of the law school, we were able to do that too!  As ever the organising committee, session chairs and colleagues in supporting departments at NTU pulled out all the stops.

We were delighted to have students both attend and deliver some of the papers.  We were also delighted about the extent of participation from jurisdictions outside the UK, particularly in India.  And we had a tremendous opening session from our inspiring keynote speaker, Foluke Adebisi as well as food for final thought in John Hodgson’s reflections on his lifetime in legal education.

Foluke Adebisi, The future of law (and legal education) in an unequal and imperilled world   

Alina Hruba Legal Education in Nordic Countries: comparative approach

Stephen Idowu Ilesanmi, Multidisciplinary legal education in Nigerian built environment

 Nandini Boodia- Canoo, Centring Humanity in Legal Education – a classroom experience

Gábor Andrási, What is your law school’s level of maturity regarding the integration of social responsibility into the organisation?

Luke Lynch, Perverting the course of [social] justice: How can we make access to legal work experience and mentoring more equitable?1

Gerard Maguire and Noelle Higgins, Maximising the PhD Supervision Experience: Two Sides of the Story

Mathew Game, Peter Vaughan and James Ball  Moving a Regulated Teaching Law Firm Online; Engaging and Supervising Students in an Online World

Jenny Kemp, The vocabulary LLM International Law students really need_

Yingxiang Long, Cultivating Innovative Private Lawmakers in the Global Context—from the Perspective of China

Sugandha Passi, Technology and Artificial Intelligence in Indian Legal Education

Sona Kumar, Auxiliary Sciences and Legal Education

Shrshtee Choudhary, Aditi Paul, Ruchika Sharma, Legislation and Jurisdiction of Suicide Laws in India: Conflicts and Retrospective Analysis3

Liz Curran, Good Practice in Legal Education for the Community and Multidisciplinary Practice

Jane Jarman and Callum Scott,  Say my name:   The formation of professional identity as a solicitor – lessons from the SRA Equivalent Means arrangements.

Emma Flint, Law School in 2022: killer of creativity or crucible of community and culture?

Laura Hughes-Gerber, Noel McGuirk, Rafael Savva, Augmenting student experience through embedding holistic student support provision for Law students into a changing curricular framework

Graham Ferris, Is law as an academic discipline still an important factor in the identity of legal academics and undergraduate students in the neo-liberal university?,

Hazel Dawe, Building learning communities as a means of helping students cope with the transition from school to university

John Hodgson, Closing remarks: reflections on 35 years in legal education

Dr Liz Curran, Research Impact Lead at Nottingham Law School, discusses ‘Pathways to Empowerment’:

On Thursday 28 November 2021 a research evaluation report entitled Pathways to Empowerment recently authored by myself and my former colleague, Pamela Taylor-Barnett at ANU was launched on Zoom. It was commissioned by the Hume Riverina Community Legal Service and funded by the Victorian Legal Services Board and Commissioners, the Victorian Department of Justice & Regulation and NSW Legal Aid Commission.

This report has certain findings and opportunities for legal education scholars and legal assistance sector services in the UK like NLS’s Legal Advice Clinic, so I share some of the report’s findings with NLS and CLEA.

The research evaluation uses ‘action research’ which is an iterative process which enables us to gather the evidence and data at various stages throughout the research and then feed this back into the service with interim reports and debriefs, so all learn along the way, reflect on what is working and why it is working or why not and enable recalibration and adjustment. Pamela and I, took an approach which involved a 360 degree perspective involving clients, students, community, multidisciplinary professionals, management, boards, and advisers including cultural advisors. Benchmarks and indicators developed in previous studies were updated and refined but consistent including with adaptations for young people, First Nations and in light of the vagaries of family violence. Multiple tools were used in order to be able to test and verify results and both qualitative and quantitative data was collected.

This ongoing embedded evaluation is unique in the Australian legal assistance services and commenced in 2015 with such longitudinal research rare. It examines operations of a community legal service and its four partner agencies (an Aboriginal community health service, a school for at-risk young people and a children and family service (including drug alcohol and homelessness) working in collaboration as a multi-disciplinary practice to reach vulnerable young people. This enabled us to measure impact, noting that genuine impact takes time. Despite Covid 19 the project still managed to keep its referrals, secondary consultations, policy reform and educational activities running in 2020-2021. I have been commissioned to conduct the Stage 3 research evaluation in 2021-22 after funders announced further funding in the first week of December 2021.

The report analyses a lot of data in different aspects of the service. For CLEA interests, I will focus on the educational findings.

Community legal education:

· Community development is more than just conveying legal information but requires a sequential, engaging, and appropriate manner suitable to the age group and audience which was undertaken here.

· Authenticity and an openness to sharing the educator/lawyers own culture and personality enabled connection with the young people.

· A need to be alert to the needs of your people and to find the points of most connection with them for example inviting them to share experiences of police and areas of uncertainty in a safe space.

· There is a role for humour and responsiveness and flexibility to each group.

· The Community Development delivery has been structured enough to be deliberate but flexible enough to allow for scaffolding (where the confidence and skills of the young people grew).

Professional Development Training

· A common theme from the interviewees was that in all their work (Professional Development, Community Development and Legal Advice/Casework), the lawyers are clear.

They speak in plain English which is another essential attribute of a worker in integrated justice practice.

· During Covid -‘Cuppa dates’ by Zoom occurred as a substitute to staff face to face training. It was undertaken in an engaging and interesting way, and where updates restrictions could be discussed, and strategies developed. There were frequent changes to the rules during Covid in this border jurisdiction and so the ability to convey the changing landscape with a sense of immediacy to the professional staff was important. It seems to have been done with agility and timeliness through these Cuppa Dates.

· One of the most critical components of a learning environment is the freedom to ask questions and clarify things. The qualitative data indicates that this was a routine style of the lawyers.

· The topics are varied and relevant to the people that the workers are helping.

· Professional Development is a capacity-building exercise. Often, not everyone can be engaged by the same means and so diversifying activities, using practical scenarios and discussion and debriefs are critical.

· Professional Development has exceeded goals set, has been accessible, engaging and relevant.

Further relevant findings:

There is a high level of reflective practice skills of the lawyers involved in the program and changes in practice appear to be supported by management. Overall the proxies (used in this evaluation as indicators to measure impact) have been met or on the trajectory of being met, namely: reach, capacity, engagement, empowerment, reciprocity and collaboration.

The report contains many other interesting elements including some moving case studies so is worth a read, if I say so myself!

The school was delighted to host the book launch for Dr Liz Curran’s innovative new publication Better Law for a Better World: New Approaches to Law Practice and Education (Routledge).  The text is designed for law students, legal educators and practitioners and covers both theoretical and highly practical ways in which legal practice and legal education can work in and with communities to improve client-centred practice.

The launch took the form of an online panel discussion, involving panel members and other participants from the academy, practice and the judiciary, and also spanning the globe. Chaired by our own Professor Jonathan Doak, the insightful panel members were Justice Maxwell, President of the Victorian Court of Appeal (Australia); Sue James, President of the Legal Action Group (UK) and Michele Leering of Queen’s University and Community Advocacy & Legal Centre (Canada).

A further launch, hosted by Australian National University took place on 4th May. A final face to face Melbourne launch by Readings Bookstore will take place in Melbourne on 18 May 2021

In the third of a series of posts on the challenges of designing vocational skills training during a pandemic, Helen Taylor (Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Law School) discusses the skill of staying positive in challenging situations:

In the Christmas break, I caught up with a film I had not seen in a long time…Point Break. Keanu Reeves as Johnny Utah (cool name!) an FBI agent working undercover in a surfers’ group discovering his own values are challenged. Ben Sharp (played by John C.McGinley) is Johnny’s boss. In the scene where Sharp and Utah meet on Utah’s first day in the job, Sharp explains with alacrity how Utah (fresh out of Quantico) knows nothing and has no field experience. Of course, if you have watched the film, Utah gets a lot of field (and beach!) experience.

And it is with that idea of a “strong personality” in the workplace, that led me to reflect on how we have tried to equip our students with the skill to deal with such personalities.

The final year skills module is designed to help students transition from study to a graduate position. Part of the design uses reflection on functional skills obtained to evaluate the merit of study in order to progress to further study or employment.

Using a skills audit we ask our students to rate a number of skills. Included within this is a skill entitled “Articulating professional identity”. This is described in part as “Staying positive in challenging situations “.

Staying positive in challenging situations in the light of the global pandemic is not something I had planned on teaching but the strategy for dealing with challenges certainly fits within that framework and gave me the chance to discuss with students how a person’s values came into play during this time.

There were numerous examples to discuss with students (not based on Johnny Utah!)– from critical workers not having enough PPE to the A level students challenging their grades. There were also my own experiences of dealing with panic buyers, friends pressuring me to meet up and the fear of challenging groups who did not appear to be complying with social distancing rules.

Linked to the concept of professional identity, ethics and personal values, a scenario explaining a challenging situation was created. As part of the exploration of the scenario many students realised as a more junior employee in an organisation, their ability to speak out in accordance with their values may be difficult. The staying positive part came from the discussion of the Giving Voice To Values methodology.1 I was lucky (and extremely grateful) to have had the input of my colleagues (Professor Jane Jarman and Visiting Professor Liz Curran) when devising the materials used.

The Giving Voice to Values methodology is a positive step in that it is a technique that can be used by students when facing workplace challenges. Devised by Mary Gentile, the approach enables students to assess a situation and practice a narrative for dealing with the issues. Mary Gentile’s research shows that this type of practice creates a “muscle memory” when dealing with other difficult situations in the future.

And whilst the students might not become FBI agents like Johnny Utah, I hope they can deal with the challenges employment can throw at them.

1 Gentile, M., Giving Voice to Values: How to Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right, Yale University Press

Jane Ching, Professor of Professional Legal Education at Nottingham Law School and Director of the Centre for Legal Education, with an update on CLECON 2020:

On 11th December we held a follow up from our successful online conference in June 2020 on Impact and Wellbeing. Doing so online, with our new-found confidence in online meetings, would not have occurred to us only a year ago. Now, however, it was a wonderful opportunity to catch up on ongoing projects and share experiences of university life in the new normal. Braving wifi connections and time zones, we had participants from Australia, India, South Africa, Spain, the UK and the USA sharing and supporting each other. Special shout out to our keynote speaker, Dr Liz Curran, now safely returned to Australia.

Our 2020 conference was long in the planning, and we were devastated in the spring of 2020 when it became obvious that a face to face event was not going to be possible.  By then, however, we had gathered together a fascinating group of papers and participants from around the world.  So, with the support of the school and our supporters, we reconvened on a more intimate basis, with papers delivered in shorter morning and afternoon sessions across the week of 22nd to 26th June 2020.  Despite the challenges, discussion was vigorous and ongoing links have been made.

Opening and closing remarks were given by Associate Professor Graham Ferris and Associate Professor Jane Jarman, and an inspiring keynote on Measuring Impact through Research into Access to Justice Service Delivery and Legal Education Initiatives was delivered by Dr Liz Curran of Australian National University.

UK participants came from Nottingham Law School and from NTU’s School of Social Sciences as well as Birmingham, Hertfordshire, Leeds, OU and Sheffield. International participants – often braving differences in time zones to join us – represented Australia, Egypt, Hungary, India, Jamaica, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the USA.  Our group included people at all stages of their careers, and with interests in both academic and vocational education.

It was clear that both impact and wellbeing are concerns across the globe in legal education, and that people are pushing forward in their practice in both making and measuring impact and in incorporating wellbeing into the curriculum and communal life of law schools.  The challenges vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but the drive to improve is shared, as is an urgent concern with the consequences of heavier reliance upon information technology for educational delivery.

Impact is of course a quality assessed in the UK’s REF, but as was clear from Liz Curran’s keynote that it is far more.  It is an aspiration, and can best be both achieved and measured if research is collaborative, engaging with community research partners from the stage of design, through the research investigation and beyond into the qualitative and quantitative assessment of the effects of the research.  There is impact inside and outside the academy and impact through research and through legal education.

The impact of legal education is where the role of impact and the role of welling connect.  Incorporating a concern with wellbeing in the curriculum, whether through attention to “soft skills” or collaborative inquiry, or experiential learning, or through building relationships was one theme.  A second was incorporation of what is known about activities and attitudes and wellbeing into legal education which has sometimes been characterised by an unhealthy individual competitiveness and instrumentalism. However, it was recognised that many of the pressures facing our students are generated outside the academy.

Thus, the concern with wellbeing joined once more the concern with impact both inside and, crucially, outside the academy.  As legal educators we are preparing our students for a life beyond the university.  As legal researchers, we are trying to make sure that world is one that is fit to receive them.

Taher Abouleid: The Impact of Legal Education on the Legal Profession in Egypt

Gabor Andrasi: Expected but not taught? Teaching management at law schools in Hungary and the U.S.

Peter Benbow and Richard Machin: Promoting wellbeing through social work legal education

Jane Ching: Aligning the agenda, the investigatory model and the impact in legal education reviews

Liz Curran (Keynote): Measuring Impact through Research into Access to Justice Service Delivery and Legal Education Initiatives

Carol Edwards and Liz Hardie: The Challenges and Rewards of Setting up a Mentoring Programme in the Virtual Environment

Graham Ferris: Does legal education build or degrade resilience?

Neal Geach and Claudia Carr: The Wellbeing of University Law Students and Staff

Hossam Hassan: The Role of Legal Clinics in Legal Education’s Development in Egypt: the model from Mansoura Law School

Emma Jones: Commonalities and commodities: Reflections on developing a wellbeing resource for legal professionals

Rachael O’Connor: Lawyer Identity and Personal Wellbeing 

Geo Quinot: Legal Education in Community: collaborative legal education, an ethic and pedagogy of care and Ubuntu

M.S. Sharmila: Towards an Integrated Legal Education: a conscious way of strengthening the well being of lawyers and law students in India 

Helena Stoop: The use of Blended Learning to Support Student Wellness: experiences teaching Company Law at the University of Cape Town