Reforming the curriculum of the Postgraduate Certificate in Laws at HKU: revolution or evolution?

Wilson Chow, Julienne Jen and Firew Kebede Tiba (University of Hong Kong) presented an account of the curriculum reform of the Postgraduate Certificate in Laws at the University of Hong Kong.

The presenters’ slides are embedded below, and their full paper is available to download at the bottom of the page.

The Postgraduate Certificate in Laws (PCLL) has been a compulsory requirement for admission to legal practice in Hong Kong since 1972. Only ad hoc and piecemeal reviews and reform efforts had been carried out at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) since then, bringing few changes to the programme.

In 2001 a landmark study by the Hong Kong government recommended numerous changes to the curriculum of both the LLB and the PCLL, including one controversial recommendation – to abolish the PCLL and replace it with a vocational course taught and regulated by the professional bodies, with an official body overseeing standards of entry to practice. This recommendation was eventually not accepted, however it has not been possible for the PCLL providers to ignore some of the study’s other key recommendations.

The HKU PCLL took the opportunity to undertake a significant and substantial curriculum reform under the organising themes of problem solving and transfer of learning, which first went operational in September 2002 . The reform process took an incremental and evolving approach and went through a few stages before reaching its current state.

The presenters’ paper argues that curriculum reform is a continuing process – although the HKU PCLL (and the PCLL in Hong Kong generally) has managed to overcome the serious challenge made to its existence by well considered curriculum development and evolution, taking into account various (and sometimes, conflicting) demands from a cross section of the legal profession, students and society, there should be no time for complacency. Moving forward reform at the apex not integrated with reform demands at the undergraduate level is not going to bring about the most desirable outcomes – skills training cannot be a self contained exercise detached from the legal knowledge required to solve problems.

The increased diversification and specialisation of legal practice as well as the demand on new practitioners to be versatile lawyers makes it all the more important that the curriculum, both the LLB and the PCLL, further continues to evolve.

About the presenters

---

Wilson Chow is an associate professor and head of the Department of Professional Legal Education at the University of Hong Kong. He has been intimately involved with the PCLL curriculum reform. Among his key publications in this area is Developing active learning of skills in professional legal education: from theory to ethnography in Hong Kong (with Felix W H Chan and Richard W S Wu), Asian Journal of Comparative Law 2006 1(1).
 
Julienne Jen is a senior teaching consultant and Deputy Head (Curriculum Development) at the Department of Professional Legal Education at the University of Hong Kong. She prepared a report on the department’s new PCLL curriculum during 2008-09.
 
Firew Kebede Tiba joined the Department of Professional Legal Education in August 2009 as a postdoctoral fellow. He works with the department’s research group on e-learning in professional legal education.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010