Subject to the vagaries of air travel, I will arrive in Sydney later today to attend the UNSW Legal Education Conference. I’ll be presenting with my colleagues Alex Steel and Melissa Castan on some work we are doing developing a taxonomy of legal education research. More on that in another post.
In this post, I outline my thoughts on the state of publishing in Australian legal education. I’ll be presenting these as part of a plenary panel at the conference.
A black swan is an event or occurrence that deviates beyond what is normally expected of a situation and is extremely difficult to predict.
The term ‘black swan’ derives from the story that the English had traditionally defined the word ‘swan’ as a bird that was white. Swans’ whiteness was integral to their ‘swanness’. When the English came to Australia and saw black swans, they were thrown by this completely unexpected event. If swans were by definition white, what was this black bird? It was impossible to have predicted the event of a black swan because of the circumscribed definition of swan.
Author Nicholas Taleb used the term ‘black swan’ in his best selling book. He suggests that we cannot predict the future if we expect the current circumstances to continue on the same trajectory as they have in the past. I think that the legal profession is in such a predicament.
My previous post gave an overview of the Law Society of New South Wales’ flip Report, on the future of law and innovation in the profession. My overall impression is that the Report might provide a useful and very gentle overview of the road ahead, but fails to engage in any real sense with the way in which technology will – and already is – changing law and legal practice.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the chapter devoted to legal education. This poses a real limit on the possibilities for innovation – especially to the extent that regulatory bodies are likely to accept the Report’s statement that existing knowledge and skills must remain.
‘The robots are taking our jobs!’*
The Law Society of New South Wales (‘LSNSW’) has recently released its flip Report (the Future of Law and Innovation in the Profession). Through submissions and a series of hearings between May and November 2016, the Futures Committee has provided the profession with a readable overview of the contemporary environment for the practice of law in New South Wales. And, I dare say, in the rest of Australia and probably beyond.
The Report responds to the exponential rate of change faced by the legal profession, notably through the advent of new technologies. It provides not only a series of key findings, but also a series of recommendations concerning the role of the LSNSW in supporting innovation in the profession.
In this post I provide some initial thoughts on the overarching approach of the Report.
Swans are necessarily white only if you display a lack of critical thinking
I have just spent a stimulating and inspiring two days at ANU College of Law in a consultation workshop as part of an important research project into Indigenous cultural competency for legal academics led by Marcelle Burns of UNE. The project is funded by the (now sadly defunct) Commonwealth Office of Learning and Teaching. This is a project of substance, and of national importance. The standing of the project leaders and those who participated in the workshop is testament to this.
I emerged from this overall positive discourse to news that former Prime Minister John Howard found ‘appalling’ the idea of a treaty with Indigenous Australians, and that former Prime Minister Tony Abbott dismissed a treaty out of hand. In the first place, Mr Abbott said, a treaty is entered into between two nations – I suppose he means that as a definitional question this is a logical impossibility, for Indigenous Australians hold no seat at the UN (incidentally an institution of which Mr Abbott does not approve). In the second place, Mr Abbott said that going down the path of treaty would spoil the chance for constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.
These two comments offer a case study in the very issues that occupied our thinking in the workshop. How could it be that two men could rise to be Prime Minister of Australia, senior lawmakers, with such an abject lack of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that sound in inter-cultural competence – a necessity for all professionals but in particular for lawyers.
The legal profession has been concerned for some time with the capability of law graduates for transnational practice. While much of the discussion in the context of the Australian legal profession has centered on knowledge, for example of private international law, there is inevitably an array of skills and attitudes that must accompany such knowledge to develop what might be called the global lawyer. This post teases out what those skills and attitudes might look like.
A couple of weeks ago I self-published a free interactive i-book, Land Law & Sustainability. The book is available through itunes – though it can only be viewed by those with Apple devices, I’m sad to say.
Front cover
I received a small grant from James Cook University’s Division of Learning Teaching & Student Engagement for the project. I had already been looking into the possibility of publishing an e-book. I was looking for something to support student learning in law that was inexpensive (possibly free), accessible, able to be digitally manipulated by the user, and aligned with my own teaching interests. I therefore couldn’t resist playing with the technology to do this project.
So did I achieve these goals?
katgallow 