Without access to mentoring programs, law students at Australian universities are simply missing out. The purposes of mentoring programs are multifarious and include cultivating pastoral support, sense of belonging and inclusion; enhancing study skills, communication skills, collaboration skills, organisational skills and leadership skills; enriching transformative student experiences by exposure to positive legal professional identities; growing networks with peers and local legal professionals; strengthening curriculum vitae and thus employability in a competitive job market; and keeping alumni invested in the law program. This article shares with the wider legal academy the design of a pilot mentoring program that is grounded in the literature and informed by a web-based study of current mentoring programs offered to law students at Australian universities. More specifically, the pilot mentoring program is designed for a Priestley 11, tiered and trauma-informed, without crowding the curriculum, and may be adopted or adapted by other law schools.
This study investigates the low enrolment in the University of Southern Queensland LLB Honours program, with only approximately 4% of eligible graduates pursuing it. An anonymous online survey of 66 high-achieving LLB graduates (GPA ≥ 5.0) from 2020-2024 explored motivations and barriers. Presenting novel empirical evidence, this study directly challenges the traditional view of Honours as a research apprenticeship. The data reveal overwhelmingly vocational motivations, driven by credit for Practical Legal Training (PLT) and career goals, not preparation for postgraduate study. Conversely, primary barriers were time constraints, financial reasons, and secured employment. While Honours graduates showed a higher rate of legal sector employment, the overall perception of the degree’s value in the job market was moderate to low. These findings reconceptualise the separate Honours year as a form of advanced professional, rather than purely academic, development.
This article interrogates the concept of ‘non-traditional’ law students. It proposes an alternative lens for framing these students, based on Tara Yosso’s concept of community cultural wealth (‘CCW’). Through a case study of a project conducted at Western Sydney University (‘WSU’) Law School during 2023 in the lead up to the Voice Referendum, the article shows how CCW can be harnessed to support student success and engagement. The article shows how recognising the CCW of ‘non-traditional’ or ‘new’ law students in curriculum and assessment is a means of countering the invisible pervasiveness of the dominant culture in higher education, and a means of centring diverse types of knowledge and skills. The ultimate benefit is to all students, and to the legal profession.
In this work, the author, a Red River Métis legal scholar, mobilizes autoethnographic and Indigenous Women’s Life Writing research methods to speak back to her experiences in legal education that span over three decades. Engaging with literature on the struggles of Indigenous learners and academics labouring within the Canadian Legal Academy, she reflects on colonial legal education, gendered glass ceilings and steel doors, and systemic anti-Indigenous racism that continues to act as a barrier to meaningful reconciliation in legal education in Canada.
This article describes a rural, regional, remote (RRR) clinical legal education program that was piloted in Queensland. Nine students attended four regional community legal centres during the summer and winter break of 2024 for two weeks. The students were interviewed upon their return. Students suggested that their RRR practise intentions had increased as a result of the placement – many said they could now see themselves working in RRR areas upon graduation, others said they were now considering working in a community legal centre. It seemed that their positive experiences on placement, particularly the commitment, friendliness and warmth of their supervisors, influenced their attitudes towards RRR legal practice.
The higher education sector of the United Kingdom with its long history dating back to 1096, has since developed, through a series of government reactions and actions to primarily financial concerns, into a highly stratified institutional environment that not only shapes the hierarchical and relational organisation of its higher education institutions, but also creates ideological and operational differences at the academic unit level. This article provides a comprehensive, historical, and critical overview of how the higher education sector of the United Kingdom came to be in its current differentiated pattern or form, and also the impact this stratified institutional environment has had at the academic unit level, specifically on law schools. It is shown, also with reference to new institutionalism as a theoretical framework for analysis, that this complex pattern of institutional types tends to constrain law schools in their ability to truly flourish, and that some institutional entrepreneurialism, specifically also at the micro or academic unit level such as with law schools, may be necessary to disrupt the organisational logics that sustain this seemingly enduring differentiated pattern of institutional types.
Students are distressed, student wellbeing services are overwhelmed, and the need for criminal law and criminology academics to access trauma-informed training and tools has never been more urgent. This paper presents a trauma-informed matrix, developed as an easy-reference guide to trauma-informed teaching practice. The matrix combines five trauma-informed principles and three elements of teaching and learning, to produce a 15-cell matrix of trauma-informed teaching practices. To illustrate application of the matrix, the first and second co-authors independently applied the trauma-informed matrix to one of their courses, which forms the basis for the two-case studies presented in this paper. Both courses have sensitive course content, including a Priestley 11 criminal law and procedure course and an applied criminology course. These reflections on our teaching practices and courses were subsequently integrated to highlight shared and unique design and teaching considerations. The two case studies unpack the trauma-informed practices used, identify opportunities for improvement, and demonstrate how academics can apply the matrix to their courses to enhance trauma-informed practice.
Existing research and scholarship have established that emotions impact on student learning. However, to date, there has been little research regarding the learning experiences of students studying administrative law at the tertiary level. In this exploratory study at an Australian research-intensive university, we set out to explore the types of anticipatory emotions experienced by administrative law students at the start of term. One hundred and sixty-six administrative law students at the University of New South Wales were surveyed during 2021 about their perceptions of studying the course. Students reported a mix of both positive emotions such as interest and excitement, as well as negative emotions such as boredom and fear. The most salient factor influencing student emotions were perceptions about the topic and course content. While generally students valued administrative law and believed they would be successful in the course, they also reported concerns relating to its workload. These findings provide valuable insight into student perceptions of administrative law, alongside an evidence base for improving the learning and teaching of this topic for future cohorts and contributing to the wellbeing of law students.
Amidst an emerging focus on technology in the curriculum and a sustained student commitment to social justice, the global COVID-19 pandemic drastically and permanently changed the tertiary learning environment. Law students and educators rapidly moved to online learning, resulting in many challenges, including isolation and disengagement for some students. Co-curricular on-campus programs were also impacted with many optional activities paused while educators grappled with the design and delivery of teaching in the online environment. Using a case study analysis, this article discusses how a co-curricular program that blends technology and social justice thrived during the COVID-19 pandemic, enabling students to continue to engage in volunteer opportunities, nurture a sense of wellbeing and develop their resilience as learners and law students. Theories of student engagement are analysed with two main objectives: to identify the key lessons from this challenging period applicable to co-curricular programs; and to assess the impact of online delivery on situated learning experiences. This article contributes to the literature exploring student engagement and the purpose of legal education beyond the curriculum. Drawing on measurable outcomes and observations, we conclude that our response to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us key valuable and sustainable lessons in situated learning and student wellbeing that we can apply as we settle into a hybrid learning environment.
This paper describes experimentation with various generative AI tools in the delivery of a large lecture course at a law school between September and December 2023. Three techniques were adopted – AI-generated lecture summaries, AI-generated quizzes used in a ‘low-stakes’ setting, and a course chatbot. The paper explains the process used to employ each of these and reviews student surveys as to their effectiveness. It argues that the experiment shows that AI tools can be deployed at low cost and can be very effective in allowing course instructors to add forms of informal, formative assessment where a lack of resources might otherwise make that prohibitive.
This article reports the findings of the Belonging in the Law Classroom Project (Belonging Project) – a qualitative research project undertaken during 2022 with the support of an UniSA Early Career Researcher Teaching and Learning Grant. The Belonging Project aims to improve the experience and retention of first-year Law students by better understanding and fostering their sense of belonging in the online or physical classroom. The idea that students can and need to belong to a higher education community has become engrained within higher education policy and practice. Past studies have identified a strong causal link between students’ sense of belonging at University and student retention. This has led to a sustained focus on developing institutional strategies to improve student engagement, largely focused on extra-curricular supports or activities, but less focus on what happens in the classroom to foster student belonging. By focusing on student belonging in the classroom, and enacting dialogic approaches to provide students with opportunities to talk and explore within the classroom setting, as well as connecting with their life worlds and funds of knowledge to help students identify the existing skills and resources that they bring to the law studies, the Belonging Project provides a fresh perspective for teaching staff to understand student retention and engagement This article will explore some of the practical frameworks, exemplars and resources complied during the Belonging Project to provide first year law teachers with building blocks that they can utilise to foster student belonging in their classroom.
Persuasive writing is an essential skill for a lawyer. Budding lawyers hone their persuasive writing skills during their studies, in part through essay-style examinations. However, Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently proved adept at a broad range of language tasks. They could undermine the utility of many existing forms of law school assessment by allowing students to generate essays artificially. This paper explores the extent to which those concerns are warranted. This study first explores the constituent elements of persuasive legal writing and reviews the available literature on an LLM’s competence in each area. It then evaluates whether OpenAI’s powerful LLM, GPT-4, can produce essay-style answers to a post-graduate law school exam on legal theory. The GPT-4 output is compared to essays written by actual honors students by having them blind-graded by human graders using the subject’s examination rubric. The study finds that GPT-4 cannot match the honors students. Whilst it can produce essays which are of a passable grade, there are significant challenges producing higher quality content. The paper closes with observations about the experience, prompt engineering, LLM-bias and the technology’s implications for the legal profession.
The Socratic method has been a foundational pedagogical approach in legal education to elicit reasoned responses and effective arguments from students. While this technique is seen as an effective means of building critical thinking skills and challenging students to analyse complex legal concepts, it can also alienate and intimidate women and minorities. Indeed, research has shown that these negative impacts can have far-reaching implications for these students’ educational performance, wellbeing, and future in the legal profession. This paper draws upon the academic literature for fostering supportive and inclusive environments in diverse law school classrooms to design and test an innovative adaptation of the inclusive Socratic method. By adding embedded dialogic feedback, authentic assessment and collaborative activities to create a supportive and inclusive classroom environment for law students from diverse backgrounds, our model promotes equal opportunities and cohort-building, while also fostering individual empowerment and wellbeing. In doing so, this new model of teaching and learning also assists in providing a solution to gender, ethnicity, class and health disparities in educational performance and participation in the legal profession.
The imperative of law schools to embed Indigenous cultural safety in legal education is well established. This paper argues that clinical legal education can make an important pedagogical contribution to the development of Indigenous cultural safety within the study of law. Drawing on a case study of a legal clinic in Logan, Queensland, this paper details clinic teaching and learning activities, and highlights the role of yarning as a process for engaging cultural humility and understanding. A review of pedagogical theories is provided to demonstrate that multiple theoretical approaches support the clinical method as an effective vehicle for delivering transformative learning on issues such as institutional racial bias within law, the legal profession, and broader society. Clinic evaluation reveals strong cultural safety learning outcomes. This paper concludes with some observations about the clinic’s strengths and limitations, including the benefits of devolving autonomy for clinic design to Indigenous clinical supervisors, issues of scalability and funding for community stakeholders.
The completion of legal work experience, including internships, has become quasi-mandatory for law graduates to be competitive for paid employment in the Australian legal profession. However, the employability skills and professional connections which students hope to gain through such work experience may be affected by a variety of factors, including if their workplace supervision is not effective. This is a particular issue for law students from groups underrepresented in the profession, who may have less familiarity with legal work and workplaces, whose experiences are less likely to mirror those of their supervisors in a profession which lacks diversity, and who are already experiencing compound vulnerability which limits their capacity to speak up about issues. This, in turn, limits diverse students’ capacity to transition into the profession. This paper considers how to facilitate inclusive and effective supervision within the profession to enable a wide range of law students to maximise the outcomes of their legal work experience. Within this context it outlines a project to promote successful supervision by supporting both law students and lawyer supervisors as one way of helping to turn the tide in favour of a safer, more inclusive legal profession.
Existing research is largely silent on determining what factors influence individuals to undertake a law degree. Are they deeply intrinsic drivers like ‘self-efficacy’ or ‘self-confidence’, and how might extrinsic influences, such as family, teachers, or friends’ impact on those drivers? To address these questions, data were attained from 378 commencing students enrolled across three Australian law schools. Results indicate students with higher levels of self-efficacy and self-confidence are more likely to be satisfied with their decision to study law and pursue a law career. The influence of ‘teachers’ on a student’s ‘satisfaction with their choice’ was only significant for students who were also influenced by their ‘family’ – the more support from teachers and family members increased a student’s level of satisfaction. Friends only influenced a students’ intention to pursue a career in law, but not their satisfaction with their choice to pursue a law degree. This is the first study to determine the intrinsic motivations that impact a student’s choice to undertake a law degree and what extrinsic factors influence that choice.
Attendance is often assumed or reported in higher education literature as a predictor for academic performance. As universities seek a return to campus following the COVID-19 pandemic, the significance of attendance for academic performance is an important issue. This article presents the results of a three-year study involving 875 students enrolled in a compulsory law unit. It considers the importance of attendance for academic performance based on verifiable evidence using correlational analysis, and a critical assessment of the relevant literature. This research adds to the literature by qualifying the significance of attendance for differences in marks between students. It finds that attendance matters more for students enrolled in-person than it does for students enrolled online. It also finds that forcing attendance might have deleterious effects on female students including discrimination. These findings have important implications for policy and practice in law schools notwithstanding the limitations of this research. Mandating attendance for law courses is difficult to justify in the absence of other career objectives if the goal is to improve academic performance. This conclusion arises because mandatory attendance is contrary to universal design, and the benefits for academic performance are marginal relative to other factors such as engagement.
Legal education in Australia is constantly evolving to meet the needs of law students and to prepare many of them for roles in the legal profession. Examples include changes to law degree structures, optional elective units, and subjects aimed at preparing law students to be ‘workplace ready’. Law students face challenging academic requirements and law school culture that can result in greater levels of psychological distress compared to the general population. Promoting law student wellbeing and responding to high student levels of psychological distress is a key area of focus for Australian Law Schools. This article explores existing law student wellbeing studies in Australia and reports findings from an empirical exploratory study investigating the levels of depression, anxiety, and stress (DASS) using the DASS21 survey instrument in law students at a regional Australian university, James Cook University. The results from this study support earlier studies at Australian universities that show law students experience higher levels of psychological distress symptoms compared to the general population, and it is an area of concern that requires ongoing attention. Results include an exploration of the impact of factors including type of degree being studied, campus location, year of study, gender, and time spent at law school.
This article examines how Australian universities and law schools are approaching sustainability in their curricula and then explores the implications for legal education. It first looks at some broader questions about the interpretation of sustainability and the relationship between sustainability, development and the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) which influence the decisions about how to structure sustainability in a law curriculum. The article analyses the strategic and sustainability plans of a sample of Australian universities for the objectives they set for teaching and learning about sustainability and how they measure performance. It then analyses how sustainability is treated at the law school level. The conclusion of this article is that there is no common approach to the implementation of sustainability in university curricula in Australia, or in Australian law schools. There is considerable diversity in teaching and learning about sustainability and the degree of commitment to it. So far sustainability has achieved limited penetration in legal education in Australian universities. The article finishes by commenting on some opportunities to improve that.
