Teaching Legal Research at the University of Toronto
At Dean Mayo Moran‘s prompting, the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto is reconsidering how to teach legal research and writing to law students, with the goal of ensuring that graduates know how to find the law, and conduct effective legal research.
This is of course a perennial topic, raised every few years. No law school appears to have found the magic bullet, and if they had persuading a fiercely independent faculty to adopt change is always an interesting challenge.
I was struck that UofT is conducting this review at the same time as the Harvard Law School is making some major changes to its first year curriculum.
Specifically, Harvard reports that its changes seek to ensure:
* greater attention to statutes and regulations;
* introduction to the institutions and processes of public law;
* systematic attention to international and comparative law and economic systems;
* opportunities for students to address alone and in teams complex, fact-intensive problems as they arise in the world (rather than digested into legal doctrines in appellate opinions) and to generate and evaluate solutions through private ordering, regulation, litigation and other strategies;
* more sustained occasions to reflect on the entire enterprise of law and legal studies, the assumptions and methods of contemporary U.S. law and the perspectives provided by other disciplines, and to develop a common fund of ideas and approaches relevant to designing effective and just laws and institutions.
The American Lawyer had an interesting piece on how technology might fit into the first year curriculum. It seems that business and medical schools are significantly ahead of law schools in deploying Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate collaborative pedagogy.
Slaw readers would be interested in the blogosphere’s reactions to Harvard. Keep watching to see what changes actually happen in the teaching of Canadian legal research. But all kudos to Toronto for bravely raising the issue.
I’m glad to see U of T considering changes as well. As a result of my post to the Harvard blog discussion, I was contacted by Harvard for some feedback. I’ll try to post something about it tomorrow since they are looking for feedback from a wide community.
Cheers,
Connie
As to Harvard’s plans, well … a recent study has shown that more of the top 100 of the US wealthier practitioners (read plaintiffs’- bar practitioners) graduated from “second-tier” law schools than from the self-described “elite” US law schools. No doubt that means something else, too.
See, “The Inverse Relationship Between Prestige and Salary” at
http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2006/12/the_inverse_cor.html
and
“Where did High-End Plaintiffs’ Lawyers go to Law School?” at
http://www.elsblog.org/the_empirical_legal_studi/2006/12/where_did_highe.html
So, the University of Toronto Law School “is reconsidering how to teach legal research and writing to law students, with the goal of ensuring that graduates know how to find the law, and conduct effective legal research”?
Let’s apply some flawed logical analysis to this problem – about on the level of too much of what passes for acceptable legal analysis these days in too many of the areas in which I practice – and see where it leads us. (Law students should learn how to put up and knock down *irrelevant* straw men. It’ll give them good practice when it comes to writing facta and dealing with reasons for judgment.)
If it’s true that, after all these years, Canadian laws schools are still turning out graduates who aren’t competent at legal research, maybe it’s not really the schools’ or teachers’ problem. Maybe it’s a problem with the quality of the students. Maybe the problem is that the schools’ admission standards are simultaneously both too low and too high. (This is called approbation and reprobation. Law students should learn that, too. It’s much nicer way of saying “sucking and blowing at *different* times.)
First, I’m reasonably certain (anecdotally, and from personal experience) that if we were to check an adequate sample of graduates who were admitted to law school immediately after 2 years of university education, we’d find that all of them easily met the law schools’ requirements for (at least) research and writing aptitude. If we assume that state of affairs is likely to exist for future candidates, the law schools could restrict admission only to that group.
I understand that the 2-year window has been or is being eliminated. If so, this suggests the schools should reconsider that.
I suppose, though, that might make for too small a class. It would probably play havoc, too, with the most of the schools’ sports teams’ recruiting drives (at least in some cases), but then that’s probably not a central feature of the schools’ admission standards.
Next, if we checked an adequate sample of those admitted as mature students, I wonder if we’d find that all, or at least most of them, also met the law schools’ requirements for research and writing aptitude. If so, the law schools could continue to admit that group.
That means the bulk of the problem students come from the group admitted on the basis of at least one undergraduate degree. If this is the case, well … post hoc ergo propter hoc, right? If we eliminate that group from those eligible for law schools, or at least raise the admission standards – say nothing below nomination for Nobel prize or its equivalent (excluding economics) – it seems we’ll have a reasonable chance of a graduating law school students who know how many legs there are in a syllogism, and where to put them.
I realize that, if these standards had existed in the past, most people who are now practitioners, judges, and academics would never have been admitted into law school and, similarly, their equivalents won’t be admitted in the future. However, wouldn’t this be a small, but appropriate sacrifice to eliminate the problem that Dean Moran is concerned about? And, I’m sure that all of the schools of study from which those students came would benefit from the contributions of scores of talented students who stay in their undergraduate fields for post-graduate work rather than moving to law.
Cheers,
One of my more favourite topics but one I also find very frustrating. I believe I have said it here before on Slaw, so I will be brief here. My belief is that casebooks play no small role in the ability (or the inability as the case might be) of law students to conduct legal research. The timing of LRW classes also plays a part. But essentially, we teach them LRW and then they rarely have to use those skills because they are given casebooks that contain all the cases and statutes that the profs want them to see, there is no incentive to conduct legal research unless they are writing a paper. The skills they are given in LRW are not backed up with practical application. If you don’t use those skills, you lose them.
Here is an idea: why doesn’t UofT jut teach its law students how to be a lawyer?
I have to agree with Mark with regard to first year students losing their skills that they learn (if they really learn them at all!) I also think that law schools and law firms need to explain to students how important legal research is, rather than merely putting it down on a job description.
As someone who has articled, no one explained to me in my law firm how important legal research was going to be before I started. I already knew how important it was going to be as I enjoyed legal research in the first place. However, many of my peers don’t realize how important it was and had trouble researching memos when they went into articling. As law librarians, we can explain to them all they want about how important legal research is, but until they actually get out of school and into the profession, they won’t realize it. Kudos to U of T for re-examining how they teach legal research.
“Legal research” beyond the “how do I do X, now” matters only to those in the profession whose role involves opinining on the validity of some action or proposed action. There’s a good chunk of the profession for whom “legal research” isn’t anything more than that, and their needs are met by current awareness material.
Apart from that, Daniel’s comment that many graduating law students don’t realize the importance of research seems to support my point that the solution for the problem is to change the admission requirements for Canadian law schools [8-)]