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In 2012, a team of academics from six universities worked on an OLT-funded project, ‘Rethinking Law Curriculum: developing strategies to prepare law graduates for practice in rural and regional Australia’. The project was motivated by the declining proportion of lawyers being attracted to and remaining in practice in rural and regional Australia. The main outcome of the project was an open education resource designed to sensitise students to the realities of the rural and regional legal practice context in the form of a customisable curriculum package that can be embedded as components within existing units of study, or developed as a stand-alone unit. Three of the team members have now implemented the curriculum package within their law school programs, two in the form of a stand-alone elective unit delivered to undergraduate law students, and the third to support placement programs for law and paralegal students. Applying the process of peer observation and collaborative reflection, this paper reports on their experiences to offer insights on how to adapt and integrate the ‘Rethinking law’ package within the law school curriculum. In particular, this paper will discuss the significance of place-consciousness as a pedagogical tool, and the capacity of the ‘Rethinking Law’ package to encourage law students to ‘re-imagine’ careers in rural and regional Australia and their role as the country’s future lawyers.

Legal education in Australia is traditionally focused on teaching the 'Priestley 11' core areas of legal knowledge and the skills necessary for legal practice. More recently, a range of factors have prompted a shift in legal education towards exploring the 'broader context' in which legal issues arise, which may include a range of socio-legal considerations, such as race, culture, gender and Indigenous perspectives. 1 Yet to do so, legal educators need to move beyond doctrinal methods of teaching law, so that they can engage law students in a meaningful way, as well as in a way that can work with and through 'wicked' problems.A 'wicked' problem is defined as one that is difficult or impossible to solve because it is incomplete, contradictory and involves changing requirements that are often difficult to recognise. 2 We contend that

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