2004 Competition - Joint Winner

Is legal education working?

Sarah Sargent (University of Leicester)

Imagine the diverse and sometimes conflicting roles of being a practicing lawyer, a part time law professor, and a candidate for an LLM all at the same time! Over the past year, I have been all three, and all three at once. Having practiced in the USA in the area of family law, and more particularly, children’s issues, for several years, I felt as if I needed to enhance my knowledge and practice skills in law. Local continuing legal education classes repeated series of introductory material – there was very little new offered, yet the area of law is constantly changing, and I felt I needed a boost to sharpen my skills to keep abreast of the changes in law since I had been called to the bar.

My search for course work or classes was at first fruitless. There was nothing offered close to me, and short of quitting my full time job and moving half way across the country to become a full time student again, an LLM was not an option – until I came across information on distance learning LLMs in the UK.

At first I dismissed the idea out of hand, as it seemed to far fetched. Yet, I wrote away for several catalogs, and found a course that fit nicely with my professional interests and desire to sharpen research, writing, and analytical skills. So, I enrolled, and am pleased to say I am now half way through the modules towards my LLM.

Then an offer came from my local law school. Would I be interested in teaching a course there part time in the Spring semester? Delighted at the chance, I said yes, and embarked on a mad semester of being a part time law teacher, student, and practicing lawyer all at once.

American law schools still heavily use the Socratic method of teaching, and the one where I taught was no different. Students expected a rather grim, punitive approach from their teacher – motivation by fear rather than by love of learning. By contrast, my distance learning LLM professors adopted a much different approach – free discussion was encouraged, no one was humiliated during the weekend tutorials, and the learning approach was refreshingly academic – to be able to put together concepts of case holdings, policy, and come to independent conclusions about how the law and policy fit together. American law school teaching requires students to do rote recitation of case holdings, often by memory, and an inability to recite correctly requires them to leave the remainder of the lecture.

Appreciating the UK approach, I decided to try this with my class. It met with very mixed results. Students were uncomfortable with the departure from the expected Socratic drills. Some embraced my approach, others found it not to their liking.

The experience of teaching gave me new appreciation of the challenges that the distance learning professors faced. The manner and method of the materials presented, both face to face at the tutorials and in the reading assignments was critical and required a great deal of organisation. As I struggled to complete my research paper assignments for the UK course and experienced a bizarre series of computer failures, I had heightened sympathy for some last minute computer disasters my own students had as they finished their research assignments. Switching roles from being called ‘professor’ by my students, to becoming a student, from preparing lecture notes, to reading my UK assignments, some times left my head in a whirl.

The UK curriculum offers an emphasis on policy development and research that is not the norm in American law schools. It offers tools necessary to the practice of law, that of independent problem solving, research, and analysis that American students are denied when asked to do rote recitation only. The benefit of being able to research in unfamiliar territory has paid off immediately at work. I have a new sense of confidence when I undertake research, and have found British legal and policy sources to be very useful for work. The similiarity of the UK and US systems in some ways is striking – even more striking are the differences in the legal systems, which in comparing and contrasting, have helped me to understand my own legal system and its principles much better.

My learning experience with the UK postgraduate distance learning course has filled several gaps that my American legal education had left, and has more than fulfilled my expectations in helping to sharpen the legal skills I use daily in practice. With its concentration on more than case law development, but on analysis, research and policy, the UK course has broadened my horizons, but perhaps best of all, continues to be a very enjoyable experience.

Last Modified: 22 July 2010