Reforming Irish Legal Education?
Change in the structure of legal education is in the air. It is one of the themes of the Second Legal Education Symposium which will be hosted by the Faculty of Law, University College Cork, on Friday 7 December 2007. As with last year’s symposium, this year’s will also be generously sponsored by Dillon Eustace, Solicitors.
This symposium will bring together various parties with an interest in legal education including students, teachers, researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and more – in the hope of enriching the debate and informing future decisions. The theme of the morning session will concern the undergraduate curriculum and will include a key-note address by Professor Joseph W. Singer (Harvard) describing recent (and much discussed and debated) curriculum reforms there. The afternoon session will focus on the implications of Fourth Level Ireland for Law Schools.
Harvard isn’t the only US law school to think about curriculum reform; there is in fact a robust discussion of these issues ongoing at present in many US law schools, including Yale, Stanford and Vanderbilt; and another exciting change has been made by up-and-coming University of Detroit Mercy School of Law in their Law Firm Program. Nor are these the only kinds of curriculum reform being contemplated.…
