Learning from each other: global and local
interdependencies in legal eduction
Professor Paul Maharg
paulmaharg.com/slides

1. Challenging hegemonies
preview
conditions for self-determination; modes of learning
2.Simulated clients
a portrait of the outsider as insider
3. Digital innovations
Simulations: SIMPLE, VOS
4. Extreme law schooling
Examples of law schooling at the edge (or over it)

1. Challenging hegemonies

signature pedagogies (Lee Shulman)
Sullivan, W.M., Colby, A., Wegner, J.W., Bond, L.,
Shulman, L.S. (2007) Educating Lawyers.
Preparation for the Profession of Law, Jossey-Bass,
p. 24

transforming the pedagogy…?

John Dewey
(1859-1952)
At Columbia U, he was involved in…
• Special Conference on Logical and
Ethical Problems of Law (1922), and
conducted 1925-30 jointly with
Edwin Wilhite Patterson
• Student course, entitled Logical and
Ethical Problems of the Law.
‘A democracy is more than
a form of government; it is primarily a
mode of associated living, of conjoint
communicated activity.’
Democracy and Education (1916)

Thanks to Mike Sharples,
http://tinyurl.com/6bzdgx
Standard classroom c.1908. Would you like to
learn about measurement and volume this way?

…or this way?
(Dewey’s Laboratory School, U. of Chicago, 1901)
http://tinyurl.com/6onvjp

Would you like to learn about history and town
planning this way?

… or by building a table-top town for a social life
history project? (Dewey’s Lab School)
http://tinyurl.com/59c93q

two origins of
contemporary learning theory
E.L. Thorndike John Dewey
‘One cannot understand the history of education in the
United States in the twentieth century unless one realizes
that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.’
Lageman, E.C. (1989) The plural worlds of educational research, History of Education Quarterly, 29(2), 185-214

E.L. Thorndike John Dewey
1. Educational psychologist Philosopher & educationalist
2. Theoretician & experimentalist Theoretician and practical implementer
3. Explored the dyadic relationship
between mind & the world
Interested in the arc between
experience & the world
4. Adopted as precursor of a behaviourist
approach to learning: assessment-led;
laws of effect, recency, repetition
Pragmatist approach to learning: prior
experience, ways of contextual
knowing; democracy & education
5. Emphasised teaching strategies Emphasised learning ecologies
6. Followed by: Watson, Skinner, Gagné;
outcomes, competence & instructional
design (ID) movements.
Followed by: Bruner, Kilpatrick,
standards movement, Constructivist
tradition.

so what challenges hegemonic legal education?
• New design
• New regulatory environments
• Autonomy, relatedness, connectedness – the
language of self-determination theory
• Making legal education porous
• Shifting balances of power
• Acting for the local while being aware of the global in
educational theory & practice

2. Simulated clients

Standardised Client Initiative
• Original personnel:
– Professor Clark Cunningham, Georgia State University
– Professor Gregory Jones, GSU
– Dr Jean Ker, Clinical Skills Unit, Medical Faculty, University of
Dundee
– Professor Paul Maharg, ANU
– Karen Barton, University of Hertfordshire

source of the idea…
• Medical education:
– Around 50 years of practice and research:
• 497 biomed literature citations & abstracts
• 527 journal articles
• 30 books
[Medline PubMed, keywords <“simulated patient”> 26.10.11]
• Widespread use in medical schools, MEUs, hospitals,
primary care, CPD, assessment centres.

• Large body of research literature criticised oral exams beginning in
1960s
• ‘A test that is not reliable cannot be valid’ e.g. NBME (USA) studies
exams of 10,000 medical examiners over 3 years and found
correlations between 2 examiners in one encounter <0.25
• Use of Standardised Patients since 1963
• Now used in high-stakes competency examination for licensure in
USA and Canada
• Extensively used in final exam ‘OSCE’ stations in UK medical
schools
evidence from medical education
Standardize
d Clients

SCI: our hypothesis
With proper training and carefully designed assessment procedures,
Standardised Clients (SCs) can assess important aspects of client
interviewing with validity and reliability comparable to assessment by
law teachers.

aims
• develop a practical and cost-effective method to assess the effectiveness
of lawyer-client communication which correlates assessment with the
degree of client satisfaction & confidence.
• ie answer the following questions…
1. Is our current system of teaching and assessing interviewing skills
sufficiently reliable and valid?
2. Can the Standardised Patient method be translated successfully to the
legal domain?
3. Is the method of Standardised Client training and assessment more
reliable, valid and cost-effective than the current system?

results
Questions Results
1 Is our current system of teaching and assessing interviewing skills
sufficiently
1. reliable?
2. valid?
1.No
2.No
2 Can the Standardised Patient method be translated successfully to the
legal domain?
Yes.
3 Is the method of Standardised Client training and assessment more
1.reliable,
2.valid
3.cost-effective
than the current system?
1.Yes
2.Yes
3.Yes

place of the client…?
• We make what the client thinks important in the most salient way for
the student: an assessment where most of the grade is given by the
client
• We do not conclude that all aspects of client interviewing can be
assessed by SCs
– We focus the assessment on aspects we believe can be accurately
evaluated by non-lawyers
– We focus the assessment on initial interview (which is currently
being extended at Northumbria to an advice-giving interview)
• This has changed the way we enable students, trainees and lawyers to
learn interviewing & client-facing ethical behaviour

who uses SCs?
Strathclyde University Law School WS Society (Edinburgh)
University of New Hampshire The Australian National University
College of Law
Northumbria U Law School Kwansei Gakuin U Law School (Osaka)
SRA (QLTS) Law Society of Ireland
Hong Kong University Faculty of Law Adelaide University Law School
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Law School
National Centre for Skills in Social
Care, London

SCs: people as co-producers, co-designers
The SC approach challenges:
1. Curriculum methods
2. Ethics of the client encounter
3. The cognitive poverty of conventional law school assessment
4. Law school as a self-regarding, monolithic construct
5. Law school categories of employment
6. The curricular isolation of clinic within law schools
7. Hollowed-out skills rhetoric
8. Conventional forms of regulation by regulatory bodies
9. The role of regulator, as encourager of innovation & radical reform…?
10. Disciplinary boundaries – what about a SC Unit that’s interdisciplinary?
11. Local jurisdictional practices: how might such a project work globally?

3. Digital innovations

experiential learning in law: SIMPLE
SIMulated Professional Learning Environment enables students to engage in
online simulations of professional practice. Its special pedagogy is based on
transactional learning:
active learning
through performance in authentic transactions
involving reflection in & on learning,
deep collaborative learning, and
holistic or process learning,
with relevant professional assessment
that includes ethical standards

correspondence file

Ardcalloch
directory

map of
Ardcalloch

Personal Injury project:
assessment criteria
We require from each student firm a body of evidence
consisting of:
• fact-finding – from information sources in the virtual
community)
• professional legal research & comms
• formation of negotiation strategy – extending range of
prior learning in a curriculum spiral
• performance of strategy – correspondence + optional
f2f meetings, recorded

learning spaces: three issues
1. Information management: how do students gather, track,
archive, recall, analyze data?
2. Managing voice, register, genre.
3. Discussion forum as
relational space, used as a
back-channel, close to drafting
& posting, and giving the firm
a professional identity as a
unit, when working on shared
tasks.

PI project:
(some of) what students learned
• extended team working
• real legal fact-finding
• real legal research
• process thinking in the project
• setting out negotiation strategies in the context of (un)known
information
• writing to specific audiences
• handling project alongside other work commitments
• structuring the argument of a case from start to finish
• keeping cool in face-to-face negotiations
• more effective delegation
• keeping files & taking notes on the process...
• being professional about work and life

Practice Management includes:
Thanx Anneka & Liz

key issue: simulation tempo and complexity

feasibility? cost? impact?
Feasible…?
• Very: lots of experience out there in Strathclyde, Northumbria, Glamorgan,
ANU. Complex to create sims in the SIMPLE Toolset, but easy to maintain.
Cost…?
• Development of sims; learning support for students
• SIMPLE is open-source and freely available
• SIMPLE blueprints & guidance documents are freely available under
Creative Commons licences.
Impact…?
• on students: ethical performance, learning legal argumentation, practice of
skills within professional value contexts; critique of professionalism;
formative and high-stakes assessment; transactional learning

who used SIMPLE?
Strathclyde University Law School Strathclyde U Management Science
University of New Hampshire The Australian National University
College of Law (their own version)
Northumbria U Law School Kwansei Gakuin U Law School (Osaka)
(their own version)
University of South Wales Law School RechtenOnline, Netherlands

further information
Maharg, P. (2007), Transactional learning in action, chapter
7, Transforming Legal Education. Learning and Teaching the
Law in the Early Twenty-first Century, Ashgate Publishing.
Maharg, P., de Freitas, S., (2011). Digital games and
learning: modelling learning experiences in the digital age,
chapter 1, in de Freitas, S., Maharg, P. (eds)
Digital Games and Learning, Continuum Press.
Maharg, P. (2011) Space, absence, silence: the intimate
dimensions of legal learning, chapter 13, in Maharg, P.,
Maughan, C., eds, Affect and Legal Education:
Emotion in Learning and Teaching the Law, Ashgate
Publishing.

4. Extreme law schooling

example 1: curriculum design
• New programme designs such as JD + PBL + online
– New three year curriculum: 2 (undergrad, qualifying) + 1 (Masters).
– Integration of traditionally separate subjects
– Focus on collaborative problem-solving using a PBL methodology
– Learning intellectual structures through problem immersion
– Fusing learning and immersive, integrative assessment
– Healing the academic / professional divide, in design and in new forms
of employment (adjuncts as PBL facilitators)
– Retaining choice of career pathways
– Possibility of global partnerships with other innovative PBL centres.

‘The new competition, the real threat . . . is the emergence of
entirely new models of university which are seeking to exploit
the radically changed circumstances that are the result of
globalisation and the digital revolution.’
An Avalanche is coming, Higher Education and the Revolution Ahead. IPPR , March 2013
http://www.ippr.org/publication/55/10432/an-avalanche-is-coming-higher-education-and-the-revolution-ahead

blockchain
• Blockchain code – a shared public register of code
transactions
• Decentralized file storage
• Decentralized Autonomous Organisations
• On-chain decentralized marketplaces for services
• Open technology platform
• ‘Permissionless innovation’

which services use / could use blockchain?
• Currencies & sub-currencies, eg Bitcoins - http://bit.ly/1nWUfyT - decentralized digital
cryptocurrencies. See www.bitcoin.org
• Almost any financial instrument
• Further, more sophisticated platforms,
eg Ethereum, www.ethereum.org
• Contracts and wills
• Savings wallets
• Online voting
• Decentralized government
• Secure messaging - http://bit.ly/1qtpvpZ
• Decentralized data feed
• Legal education…?

In financial terms, the digital blockchain performs moves we’ve seen in other
industries, and particularly in disintermediation. In legal education, a blockchained
environment might include learning objects, a comms system, a badge system (eg
Mozilla Badges), a payment system, access to knowledge and skills environments and
other decentralised functions. Decentralisation — what’s the role of the LMS then?
I’d guess that we’re already moving away from it, and blockchained legal education
will probably render it unwieldy, pointless.
More fundamentally, and given disintermediation, what does this do to the nature,
role and status of the law school as educational institution? And how should this be
regulated?
http://paulmaharg.com/2014/06/28/emergent-educational-designs-and-distributed-autonomous-organisations/
and
http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/maharg-emergent-educational-designs-and-distributed-autonomous-
organisations/

legal education DAO
• Peer-to-peer
• Peer-to-object
• learning objects + comms system + badge system (eg Mozilla Badges) +
payment system + other decentralized functions (eg IFTTT), using identity
and reputation system as a base
• Regulation?
See regulation of VoiP, and Bitcoins itself
http://bit.ly/1jKa4Ex

IFTTT
The title is an acronym — short for “If This Then
That” — which neatly describes the function of the
product. It is essentially a giant switchboard to
connect disparate services, anything from Facebook
to text messages to telephone calls. Users can
create “recipes” in which an action on one service
can trigger an action on another entirely different
service. […] The idea, according to co-founder
Linden Tibbets, is to give people more creative
control over the many online services they use on a
daily basis.
http://bit.ly/1nNKYeX

references
Rowe, M. and Murray, M. (2012) Teaching professionalism online – An Australian professional legal education experience, in The
Calling Of Law, Fiona Westwood and Karen Barton (eds), Ashgate, 2012
Ferguson A and Lee E. (2012).Desperately Seeking ... Relevant Assessment? A Case Study on the Potential for Using Online
Simulated Group Based Learning to Create Sustainable Assessment Practices(Link) Legal Education Review VOLUME 22
(2012) No 1&2. 2012 accessible at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2412334
Tang S and Ferguson A, (2013). Surprisingly well: Preliminary results from Surveys of Australian Professional Legal Education
Students, QUT Law Review Special Edition 2013 accessible at https://lr.law.qut.edu.au/article/view/521
Barton, K., McKellar, P., Maharg, P. (2007) Authentic fictions: simulations, professionalism and legal learning, Clinical Law
Review, 14, 1, 143-93. Available at: http://tinyurl.com/5vautp
Maharg, P. (2012). Simulation: a pedagogy emerging from the shadows, in Educating the Digital Lawyer , edited by Oliver
Goodenough and Marc Lauritsen. LexisNexis & Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, Harvard University.
Maharg, P. (2012). ‘You are here’: learning law, practice and professionalism in the Academy, in Bankowski, Z., Maharg, P. del
Mar, M., editors The Arts and the Legal Academy. Beyond Text in Legal Education, vol 1. Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot.
Maharg, P. (2012). 'Associated life’: democratic professionalism and the moral imagination, in Bankowski, Z., del Mar, M., eds,
The Moral Imagination and the Legal Life. Beyond Text in Legal Education, vol 2. Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot.

Email:paul.maharg@anu.edu.au
Web: paulmaharg.com
Slides: paulmaharg.com/slides