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Legal Education in the English-Speaking World: Lessons for Poland

4 April 2014. One of the points most strongly emphasized by the Conference on Legal Opinions and the Effectiveness of the Judiciary of the Republic of Poland, organized and held by INPRIS and the THEMIS Judges’ Association this past October at the Supreme Court of Poland, was the vital importance of high-quality legal culture in assuring the proper functioning of the judiciary of a modern and tolerant democratic state and society.

Tymoteusz Don-Siemion, Natalia Mileszyk

“The education of the judges and lawyers that we dream of, ones who are not only knowledgeable, but also highly competent and creative”, the discussion panel at the Conference concluded, “requires proper education during all of the stages of their professional development, beginning with their studies at the Departments of Law at our universities”. The participants in the Conference frequently presented legal education and practice in English-speaking countries as a desirable model.  We believe that many aspects of this model could be adapted to further the professional development of new generations of lawyers in Poland.

In this article, we bring into clear focus the characteristics of Anglo-American legal education that the participants of the Conference felt were particularly significant in nurturing the high level of legal culture that those countries are renowned for.  To do this, we examine several essential questions:  What is legal education like in the Anglo-American university system?  How does it differ from the system that exists in Poland, and what might Polish universities, despite the divergence in educational methods and legal traditions, learn from the Anglo-American model?  And, most importantly, how might changes in the way that law is taught contribute to the flourishing of a strong, robust and dynamic legal culture in Poland?

Synthesis of Theory and Practice

Legal education is—or, at least, should be—more than just the acquisition of a body of knowledge, the passive assimilation of the contents of statutes and regulations. Law is a vocation, and the imparting of mere legal knowledge, while necessary for professional success and the proper functioning of the legal system, is not by itself sufficient to produce well-trained, skilled lawyers or a vibrant legal culture.  To this end, in the Anglo-American system, the practical aspects of legal education are taken very seriously.   The educational system is founded on the premise that good legal writing, public speaking and rhetorical argument must be acquired through extensive practice.

Students are given many opportunities to hone their proficiency in oral and written argument through participation in discussion seminars, moot courts, disputations conducted according to the Socratic method and debating societies.  Their writing skills, indispensable in later professional life, are continually refined through frequent written assignments; sloppy writing and poorly presented argumentation are not tolerated, and students can usually count on getting help from their teachers in bringing their writing up to the level of quality demanded.  For instance, the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary houses a Centre for Academic Writing, which teaches students basic skills—how to cite, refer, structure thoughts, write a dissertation, and so forth—that are indispensable for professional success, but neglected in some less comprehensive educational systems.  Likewise, the law departments of leading American universities such as Columbia, in New York, offer their students comprehensive advice on how to structure arguments, make texts accessible to the end reader, and develop a methodological approach to reinforcing one’s argument through the application of legal doctrine.  At Columbia, and most other Anglo-American law schools, this support is given both inside the classroom, via feedback and writing-skills sessions with teaching assistants and sometimes professors, and through workshops and seminars hosted and organized by the university.  As concerns oral argument, both student law associations and law departments endeavor to make available to students moot courts mock legal debates and law tournaments.  Columbia University, to name just one example, organizes dozens of moot courts and national and international law competitions every year.  As a consequence, all students (not just a select few top ‘Olympians’) have ready access to sources of valuable pre-professional, hands-on legal training.

A Student-Focused and Student-Driven University Experience

Though some element of passive absorption of knowledge is always necessary,
the dominant mode of both teaching and learning tends to be active and interactive.  Law schools in the Anglo-American system usually prioritize the needs of their students over the absolute authority of the professor.  It is accepted practice for students to interrupt a professor as she is teaching and ask for clarification or bring up a connection with a related topic.  Though large-group lectures certainly exist, they tend to play a secondary role compared to small-group discussion classes, and even, at Oxford, Cambridge and several of the American Ivy League universities, two- or one-on-one tutorial sessions.  Outside of class, professors tend to be open to questions and discussion from students, even when they are not teaching; indeed, most lecturers hold designated office hours during which students are encouraged, even expected, to drop in and discuss course material. Outside of office hours, professors are almost always reachable by email, and are generally willing to schedule additional meetings with students who request them.  The same is true of the university administration—it is responsive to students’ queries and complaints, and is usually willing to help students deal with various issues, such as securing accommodation, arrangement for late payment of tuition or changes in course selection.  Thus, students rarely feel as though they need to ‘chase down’ the people that they need to get in contact with.

Even the administrative arrangements of Anglo-American universities tend to promote a proactive approach to students’ learning.  To aid independent research by their students, most law schools give students free and easy access to academic databases by providing them with VPN server credentials. Furthermore, many universities, such as the University of London system and an alliance of Central and Eastern European schools of which the Central European University forms part, have worked out arrangements for interlibrary loans, up to and including rapid deliveries of requested books across national borders.  As a result, students tend to be able to explore the areas of law that interest them in an independent, self-driven manner, an opportunity that many of them make ready use of.

Furthermore, the Anglo-American system of education prizes interdisciplinary learning: students tend to be rewarded, not met with surprise and bewilderment, when they introduce arguments from other disciplines, or from alternative approaches to jurisprudence, such as Law and Economics and political sociology. This approach, actually enshrined in many professors’ teaching, allows students to gain a broader, more critical perspective on the concepts that they are learning, and encourages them to think creatively, not formulaically—an essential skill for top-flight lawyers and promoters of an active and healthy legal culture.  A decisive role here is played by the conditions on which professors are employed: rather than remain at a single university and continue with the teaching methods of their predecessors, they are often required to teach in new environments, alongside new colleagues.  Professors may even pursue multiple complementary academic careers at the same time: Professor Jeremy Waldron, for instance, holds a professorship in Law and Philosophy at New York University and a fellowship in Political Theory at the University of Oxford. Consequently, the Anglo-American system of legal education gives rise to a culture of innovation with which students can readily engage and from which their understanding and creative application of legal concepts benefits.

What is more, many law schools, including McGill in Canada, demand that their professors teach students via Socratic seminar—a method that fosters active discussion of laws and legal principles intended to allow students to learn the rationales behind various aspects of the law, and to interact with the dissenting arguments that have been raised against important legal decisions.  Indeed, professors often emphasize how dissenting opinions in a given landmark case provided the foundations for the justifications of majority rulings in later cases. There is comparatively little place for textbook learning in the Anglo-American jurisprudence classroom; rather, what is central to teaching is analysis of court rulings, primary source documents, legal justifications, all of which develops in students a strong legal intuition and an ability to reason through legal arguments on the fly.

The dominance of the active style in teaching and learning extends not only to how material is presented to students, but also to what is taught.  The scope of Anglo-American legal education extends far beyond the current state of the law, and encompasses the development of precedent in all of the major areas of law; students are taught the reasoning behind various landmark decisions; and some universities go so far as to instill in their students an appreciation and understanding of theoretical legal doctrine from the Code of Justinian to the work of modern-day theorists such as H. L. A. Hart, Raz and Dworkin.  Even more important, students are taught to see the law as an evolving, dynamic institution, rather than the dead letter of codes and acts of government. 

Outcomes and Feedback: A Responsive Education System

The process of learning is not all that matters to students, however.  Equally important is the need students to be able to monitor the outcomes of their learning, in order to get an accurate sense of what they have learned and what aspects of their studies require improvement.  The Anglo-American system is built around an understanding of this need: students have access to many sources of detailed and individualized feedback throughout their studies.  A typical law student at the University of Oxford, for example, receives: exhaustive comments on all essays submitted as part of the course, which emphasize both strengths and weaknesses of the argument, and which give suggestions for improvement and further reading (often along with a mark indicating what score the essay would have received had it been written for a University exam); checks for conceptual understanding in the form of weekly small-group tutorial sessions; comments and criticism from the judges of moot courts and other competitions organized by the Oxford Law Society, a student organization; formal (typically annual) reviews of his/her academic performance across all courses; and, three times per year, mock exams graded by his/her professors, designed to be as close as possible to the final exam format. As these examples demonstrate, legal education in the Anglo-American system is designed to be highly transparent, such that students can quickly identify and correct various deficiencies in their studies, and do not need to wait until the end of the semester to have their progress evaluated by an opaque or impersonal academic bureaucracy.

With academic privileges comes the expectation of responsibility and honesty. An important distinguishing feature of the Anglo-American university system is the academic culture that they foster.  As the universities tend to be research-focused, there is zero tolerance towards academic plagiarism, and students caught cheating on their studies usually face steep penalties, up to and including expulsion.  As a result, cheating is relatively uncommon, and the work that students turn in is generally fully their own: professors are wary enough to notice assignments that appear to have been copied from the Internet, and many use software, such as TurnItIn, to check their students’ work against a very expansive database of sources and assignments submitted by students in the past.

Why Anglo-American Legal Education Works and What We Can Learn From It?

In conclusion, the Anglo-American system of legal education works as well as it does because it offers students a combined package of legal knowledge and the skills needed for students to apply this knowledge successfully to real-world legal issues over the course of their careers in law.  Furthermore, this body of learning is supplemented by numerous developments and institutions that strive to provide students with the support that they need to make the most of their experience in education: high-quality feedback, ease of access to learning resources, development of ‘soft’ and transferrable skills, and more.  Though the Polish legal system is built on a civil-law, rather than a common-law, foundation, the chief advantages of the Anglo-American legal education model concern not what is taught, but how it is taught.

For instance, an interdisciplinary and history-conscious approach to legal studies remains highly advantageous for students whether the specific material being examined is precedent and stare decisis (in a common-law system) or the political, economic and sociological context in which legal rules are codified and enacted (in a civil-law system).  Especially in a field as complex as education, successful solutions cannot be transferred one-to-one.  All the same, it is always prudent to examine what works in systems other than one’s own and to give serious consideration to the possibility of modifying and applying these solutions to meet the needs of one’s own system.