Presentation to Legal Education section, Society of Legal Scholars conference, 2016, St Catherine's College, Oxford, September 2016. Authors: Paul Maharg, Dirk Rodenburg

1. The Redress of Legal Education
Paul Maharg
Dirk Rodenburg

2. preview
1. Heaney’s concept of redress in poetic theory
2. Redress of legal education
3. Re-interpretations and re-readings of [legal] educational history
4. Organisation of research activity
5. Development of sound educational frameworks and strategies to
support the adoption of new digital technologies in legal education
• Slides available at: http://paulmaharg.com/slides

3. 1. Heaney’s redress of poetry

4. Seamus Heaney and the redress of poetry
‘Professors of poetry, apologists for it, practitioners of
it, from Sir Philip Sydney to Wallace Stevens, all sooner
or later are tempted to show how poetry’s existence as
a form of art relates to our existence as citizens of
society – how it is “of present use.”’ (Heaney 1995, 1)

5. ‘Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-
delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of
language as well as a representation of things in the
world.’ (Heaney 1995, 5)

6. ‘[Poetry’s] power as a mode of redress […] – as agent
for proclaiming and correcting injustices – is being
appealed to constantly. But in discharging this
function, poets are in danger of slighting another
imperative, namely to redress poetry as poetry, to set
it up as its own category, an eminence established and
a presssure established by distinctly linguistic means.’
(Heaney 1995, 5-6)

7. Heaney notes the OED’s four entries for ‘redress’,
including ‘”To set (a person or a thing) upright again; to
raise again to an erect position. Also fig. to set up
again, restore, re-establish.”’ (Heaney 1995, 15)
But he wants more than the restoration of poetry to
itself:

8. ‘[…] I want to profess the surprise of poetry as well as
its reliability; I want to celebrate its given,
unforeseeable thereness, the way it enters our field of
vision and animates our physical and intelligent being,’
(Heaney 1995, 15)

9. ‘[This] reminds me of a further (obsolete) meaning of
‘redress’, with which I would conclude [...]: “Hunting.
To bring back (the hounds or deer) to the proper
course.” In this “redress” there is no hint of ethical
obligation; it is more a matter of finding a course for
the breakaway of innate capacity, a course where
something unhindered, yet directed, can sweep ahead
into its full potential.’ (Heaney 1995, 15)

10. ‘In other words, whatever the possibilities of achieving
political harmony at an institutional level, I wanted to
affirm that within our individual selves we can reconcile
two orders of knowledge which we might call the
practical and the poetic; to affirm also that each form
of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier
between them is there for the crossing.’ (Heaney 1995,
213)

11. 2. Redressing legal education

12. redress and legal education
• Legal education requires redressing in all Heaney’s
senses, but particularly the last.
• Redress involves a constant process of re-aligning, a
sensing what education is and where it takes us.
• We need to dwell upon the phenomenological, the
‘thereness’, of educational experience
• We also need to reconcile the practical and the
visionary

14. Dewey: 1916/2016
Reflective learning – the relationship between
experience and thinking – is characterised as:
‘(i) perplexity, confusion, doubt, due to the fact that one is implicated in an
incomplete situation whose full character is not yet determined; (ii) a conjectural
anticipation—a tentative interpretation of the given elements, attributing to them a
tendency to affect certain consequences; (iii) a careful survey (examination,
inspection, exploration, analysis) of all attainable consideration which will define and
clarify the problem in hand; (iv) a consequent elaboration of the tentative hypothesis
to make it more precise and more consistent; (v) taking one stand upon the project
hypothesis as a plan of action which is applied to the existing state of affairs: doing
something overtly to bring about the anticipated result, thereby testing the
hypothesis.’ (Dewey 1916, 150)

15. 3. Re-interpretations & re-readings of
legal educational history: The
rhetoric of reading
What is everywhere passes unnoticed. Nothing is more commonplace
than the experience of reading, and nothing is less well known. Reading
is taken for granted to such an extent that at first glance it seems nothing
need be said about it.
(Todorov, 1978, p. 39).

16. strategies for reading …
What I said to my adult learners:
•Read forward – no recursive reading
•Listen to your expectations for word clusters
•Be aware of context’s effect on meaning
•Cope with loss of power & agency while you’re reading
•Form good habits and discipline

17. Panmure Lute MSS (c.1632), 5, no.3.
Music for Lute Consort, c.1500

18. Strategies for reading music…
What my lute tutor said to me:
•Read forward – no recursive reading
•Listen to your harmonic expectations
•Be aware of context
•Cope with playing and expression while reading
•Form good habits and discipline

19. strategies for reading law
(what I told myself)

20. the transitive power
of music notation…
Panmure Lute MS (c.1632), 5, no.3.
Music for Lute Consort, c.1500

21. Narrative event diagram, Personal Injury Transaction: Pursuer
… could be used as simulation notation

22. Narrative event diagram: Personal Injury Transaction: Pursuer and Defender (Gould et al 2009)

23. Compare lute tablature across two staves
with simulation notation

24. 3. Organisation of legal educational
research

25. future research needs
1. Map the field & create
taxonomies for research data
2. Organise systematic data collection on
law school stats across entry/exit points,
across jurisdictions (eg using Big Data
Project methods)
25

26. future research needs
3. Focus on learning, not NSS league tables
– see US LSSSE… and include longitudinal
research data, not just snapshots
of place & time
4. Provide meta-reviews and systematic
summaries of research, where
appropriate; literature guides, etc
26

27. how might professional bodies
contribute to this?
1. Targeted funding for research initiatives, eg Cochrane Collaboration type
of initiative from both regulators and professional bodies
2. Funding & admin support to start-up and analyze innovation – eg PBL,
public education in law, legal informatics,
data visualization, etc
3. Financial & other support to enable round table
meetings with regulators and comparative work
with other jurisdictions – globally
4. Creation and maintenance of a digital hub.
27

28. 5. Development of sound educational
frameworks and strategies to support the
adoption of new digital technologies in
legal education

29. Some initial thoughts to frame the conversation…
• Technology is a means to an end
• The fundamentals of good education do not change (debate,
critical interrogation, pain, uncertainty, struggle, interstitial
moments of clarity)
• We should seek moments of “transformation” (“threshold
concepts” – irrevocable changes in perspective)
• Practice (the application of knowledge) is not a poor cousin

30. So what does that mean for the frameworks
supporting new digital tools in legal education?
• Digital tools should be considered within the context of
specific educational objectives
– Think boldly and broadly about the rationale
– Pick a target
– Define your outcomes (as painful as this may be)
– Define the role of the digital tool in supporting those outcomes
– Support adoption (the challenges of which are either under-
estimated, or become the end of the program)

31. Let’s take an example –
Legal decision making in practice
• The desire to situate legal reasoning and decision making in
authentic contexts
– Objective: enable students to better integrate theory and
practice
– Outcomes: students will experience the challenges, discomfort
and uncertainties associated with providing legal services

32. Teaching praxis is a “noble” enterprise
• Think of all of the highly nuanced skills we all execute day to
day, skills that were hard won and are so challenging to teach
– Establishing your role and limitations
– Working as a well-coordinated team
– Collaboration
– Taking and defending a position (in work, not litigation)
– Negotiating a common path
– Establishing and carrying a common vision
– Effectively articulating and communicating that vision

33. Lessons from Medicine
• Struggle to reconcile theoretical and clinical knowledge
• Often seen by students as two unrelated domains
• McMaster University pioneered PBL as a solution to
integration
• Clinically focused problems within a clinical context served as
the gateway to theoretical knowledge
• Clinical decision making is grounded in the “hard truths” of
clinical practice

34. Lessons from Medicine
• Let clinical practice drive theoretical knowledge
• Use high / low fidelity clinical contexts to support integration
– Problem based learning
– Simulated patients
– Grand rounds
– Clerkships
– Residencies
– Early supervised practice

35. Digital Tool – Online Intelligent Simulation
• Distributed
• Scalable
• “Thick authenticity”
• Non-prescriptive
• Challenging

36. Queen’s Law – OCE Grant to
Develop Simulation Platform
• Queen’s Law recently submitted and won a $250,000 industry /
academic partnership grant to develop “intelligent” simulation
platform
• Key objective is to create an authoring platform that enables any
individual or group to develop highly compelling, complex
simulations – pan-disciplinary: law, medicine, engineering, business

37. Platform Characteristics
• Back-end connectivity to cognitive computing platform (IBM
Watson) is completely hidden from simulation creators
• Platform will integrate guided instructional framework into
authoring platform
• Narrative, characters, roles, context, are all created by
simulation authors

38. “Intelligent” Simulation
• Student’s experience:
– Present student(s) with a scenario, a role and a timeline
– Ask the student(s) to begin interacting with intelligent characters in
the scenario in a non-prescriptive manner
– Provide students with realistic character interactions that reflected an
authentic context
– Enable students to access context driven content and feedback
– Allow students to “replay” and reflect on their interactions following
the simulation

39. “Intelligent” Simulation
• Simulation creators’ experience:
– “Deep” engagement with the material
• Choose domain, boundaries and constraints
• Choose specific learning outcomes
• Develop narratives, characters and contexts that support the outcomes
• Model “real world” interactions (conduct, communication, ethics, competing
interests)
• Develop supporting materials
• Anticipate student reactions, problems, challenges
– Actively seeking “transformative” moments for the student
leads to transformation in instructional perspective

40. Other (Longer Term) Objectives
• Work collaboratively cross-institutionally (Paul
Maharg and PEARL)
• Develop an embedded assessment framework to
measure simulation performance
• Develop an embedded analytics engine to harness
simulation data for both research and simulation
development purposes

41. Paul Maharg
Email:paul.maharg@anu.edu.au
Web: paulmaharg.com
Slides: paulmaharg.com/slides
Dirk Rodenburg
Email: dirk.Rodenburg@queensu.ca
Web: law.queensu.ca
Slides: TBD