In our Law & Culture column, you will find original works of fiction, reviews of a wide range of publications — not just conventional legal texts — as well as broader cultural forms such as films, TV shows, CDs, DVDs, art exhibitions and so on. The column links in with the Alternative Law Journal’s focus on law for the disadvantaged, human rights law and law reform.Rethinking the Law School
Education, Research, Outreach and Governance
Carel Stolker; Cambridge, 2015; 472 pages; $125 (hardcover)
Law schools lie at the intersection of influence by the judiciary, the profession, the university, government, industry and the citizen. In this most detailed book, Carel Stolker navigates the complex and often competing regulatory and conceptual imperatives of the law school. Impressively, his view is truly global. The reader is taken on an international journey and while there are obviously great jurisdictional differences, Stolker highlights that law schools perhaps share more in common than might be thought.
The book has 12 chapters, but can roughly be conceptualised as covering the university, the identity of the law school, legal education, legal scholarship, engagement and governance. There are two aspects of this in particular that I would like to canvass here — characteristics that are relevant not just to legal educators, but to the legal profession and society more broadly.
The first of these is the question of law as an academic discipline within the university. Caught between academe and the profession; between the local and the global, the answer to this question in the Australian context over recent decades has been resoundingly in favour of its academic nature. Slowly however, having largely closed off professional pathways to practice, work integrated learning and a skills orientation is entering the university.
In chapter three, Stolker articulates the arguments for and against law-as-academic. He posits reasons for the outsider status of law within the university, and suggests four reasons why law is academic: ‘its impact on people and society, its complexity, its connection to other disciplines and its role in raising future legal scholars.’ I think that these questions are worthwhile for the profession and the academy to consider in our own context of the massification and vocationalisation of higher education. What is it that we are trying to achieve through university education — or training — of lawyers? Can we achieve both vocational and academic skills together? These are issues not just affecting law, I suspect, but other disciplines also.
Profiles in Australian Colonial Legal History
Heather Douglas, Francesca Bartlett, Trish Luker and Rosemary Hunter (eds); Hart Publishing, 2014; 462pp; $75 (paperback)
Carol Dyhouse; Fernwood Publishing, 2014; 328 pp; $16.95 (paperback)
The $19 Billion Legal Battle Over Oil In The Rain Forest And The Lawyer Who’d Stop At Nothing To Win
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