Teaching of statute law: research into provision of current methods and provision of teaching aids

UKCLE PDF project

Project leader: Stefan Vogenauer, University of Oxford (e-mail: stefan.vogenauer@iecl.ox.ac.uk)
Project summary: research into current teaching of legislation, and the development of teaching resources
Start date: 1 April 2010
UKCLE funding: £5,080

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This project is being carried out in association with the Statute Law Society, a charitable body which aims to educate lawyers and the wider public about the legislative process, with a view to encouraging improvements in statute law. It intends to improve teaching about legislation in law schools. Legislation is of fundamental importance in our legal system as the source of binding rules of law, and education of students for a sound understanding about it should be a high priority for law schools. Preliminary research has indicated that there is a considerable range of different ways in which law schools approach this task. This project aims to provide law schools with information about the different approaches which are adopted in other law schools and with practical assistance in the form of video teaching aids.

Aims and objectives

The project aims to improve teaching about legislation to law students; covering how legislation comes into being, and how it is used in law courts and elsewhere. To that end the project aims to:

• discover in detail how law students are currently taught about legislation, with a view to identifying possible forms of best practice or areas for improvement
• draw on the willingness of contacts in government departments, the Office of Parliamentary Counsel, Parliament and the legal profession to provide assistance to create short, useful videos about the creation and use of legislation which could be used as teaching aids in law schools and made available on the web

Methodology

A questionnaire will be targeted at legal academics to identify how law students are currently taught about legislation. Some preliminary research has already been conducted, with a limited group of academics invited for a half day meeting. This research will now be pursued in a more systematic way with a survey on a wider basis.

A short series of videos in 15 minute segments will be produced (about two to three hours in total), tracing the passage of legislation from policy proposal (government department, administrators and in house lawyers), to draft legislation (Parliamentary Counsel), to legislation (passage through Parliament; departmental lawyers responsible for briefing ministers, parliamentarians, members of select committees), to legal dispute and the framing of the legal argument (lawyers and judges).

Dissemination and deliverables

A questionnaire will be produced for the research, and could potentially be used subsequently, or developed for further use, to repeat the exercise in future to obtain a view of the picture of the teaching of legislation as it changes over time. The survey should be concluded in August 2010. A report will be produced summarising the information gathered from the questionnaire, to give an idea of the range of teaching methods which are used and to help identify those which are found to be particularly effective. Findings will be disseminated back to teachers who have participated in the project, and also through presentations at conferences, including the Learning in Law Annual Conference in 2011.

A series of short films regarding the production and use of legislation will be produced. There will be between two and three hours of film, broken down into fifteen minute segments to make them as attractive to and digestible by students as possible. A film of a one hour lecture on statutory drafting by leading Parliamentary Counsel will also be produced. These films will be available online, and available to law schools in DVD format.

Last Modified: 6 July 2010