Life skills and career tips for Canada's lawyers in training
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/55358
BY HEATHER GARDINER LEARNING BY DOING Alain Alphonse, a second-year law student at the University of Ottawa, spends many hours researching at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society. Law schools around the country are starting to offer more opportunities for students to use their training in legal thinking and apply it to the actual practice of law. Th e report cited two major limita- T he release of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advance- ment of Teaching's report on legal education in 2007 caused quite a stir in the law commu- nity. Th e report, "Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profes- sion of Law," featured a study of 16 law schools in the United States and Canada that found the schools were conduct- ing too much theoretical teaching and not off ering enough ethical and practi- cal training. It recommended that law schools integrate legal analysis, ethics training, and practical experience into their curricula. "Students need a dynamic curricu- lum that moves them back and forth between understanding and enactment, experience and analysis," the report stated. "Law schools face an increasingly urgent need to bridge the gap between analytical and practical knowledge, and a demand for more robust professional integrity." tions of legal education: 1. "Most law schools give only casual attention to teaching students how to use legal thinking in the complexity of actual law practice. Unlike other professional ed- ucation, most notably medical school, le- gal education typically pays relatively little attention to direct training in professional practice. Th e result is to prolong and rein- force the habits of thinking like a student rather than an apprentice practitioner, conveying the impression that lawyers are more like competitive scholars than attorneys engaged with the problems of clients. Neither understanding of the law is exhaustive, of course, but law school's typically unbalanced emphasis on the one perspective can create problems as the stu- dents move into practice." 2. "Law schools fail to complement the focus on skill in legal analyses with eff ective support for developing ethical and social skills. Students need oppor- tunities to learn about, refl ect on, and practice [sic] the responsibilities of legal professionals. Despite progress in mak- ing legal ethics a part of the curriculum, law schools rarely pay consistent atten- tion to the social and cultural contexts of legal institutions and the varied forms of legal practice. To engage the moral imagination of students as they move toward professional practice, seminar- ies and medical, business, and engi- neering schools employ well-elaborated case studies of professional work. Law schools, which pioneered the use of case teaching, only occasionally do so." Governor General David Johnston, himself a former law school dean at the University of Western Ontario, echoed the report's fi ndings in his speech at the Canadian Bar Association conference in Halifax last summer. "In my judg- ment, we have allowed too great a di- vide to develop between academia and the profession. We do not cure this by forcing the profession back in, but rather by making the compelling case that the C ANADIAN Lawyer 4STUDENTS SPRING 2012 7 BY JEREMY HAINSWORTH GAIL J. COHEN