Teaching plumbing with Periclean ideals: Should it be done? Can it be done? Advocacy and courtroom scholarship
Search citation statements
Paper Sections
Citation Types
Year Published
Publication Types
Relationship
Authors
Journals
Cited by 3 publications
References 15 publications
In 1967 an academic wrote: “AA university is not a trade school for the production of plumbers”. He wrote about legal education which in England, as in many other countries, has a tradition of recognising academic study and vocational training as separate stages on the route to professional qualification. Thirty years ago universities catered for a relatively small sector of the population; concentrating on undergraduate studies for students entering at the age of 18. Notes the evolution in universities since that time and debates the experience universities should be providing for students today. It will suggest that the failure to distinguish the various forms of higher education is detrimental to the degree and this in turn is harmful to universities. It will conclude by questioning whether Dearing is likely to provide appropriate solutions to the problems
In 1967 an academic wrote: “AA university is not a trade school for the production of plumbers”. He wrote about legal education which in England, as in many other countries, has a tradition of recognising academic study and vocational training as separate stages on the route to professional qualification. Thirty years ago universities catered for a relatively small sector of the population; concentrating on undergraduate studies for students entering at the age of 18. Notes the evolution in universities since that time and debates the experience universities should be providing for students today. It will suggest that the failure to distinguish the various forms of higher education is detrimental to the degree and this in turn is harmful to universities. It will conclude by questioning whether Dearing is likely to provide appropriate solutions to the problems
The inescapable reality is that most law school graduates are headed for professional life. This means that law schools have some accountability for the competence of their graduates, and thus an educational responsibility to offer their students instruction in the basic skills of legal representation. The most obvious and direct gain from the university law school offering more training in the generally neglected applied legal skills of trial advocacy, interviewing, counselling, drafting and negotiation, is the benefit to students in helping them bridge the gap between traditional basic legal education and practice. Although I strongly believe that the LLB curriculum should also include courses in legal writing, negotiation, client counselling, and witness interviewing, I emphasise adding a clinical course in trial advocacy to the LLB curriculum for a number of specific reasons. Trial advocacy consists of a set of skills that transcends the walls of the courtroom. It is difficult to conceive of a practising lawyer who does not, in some way and at some time, utilise the skills of advocacy -fact analysis, legal integration and persuasive speech. Even the technical "forensic skills" of trial advocacy, such as courtroom etiquette and demeanour, learning how to phrase a question to elicit a favourable response, and making an effective oral presentation, transfer readily to a wide range of applications within both the legal and business worlds. In addition to learning how to prepare and present a trial from the opening speech through to the closing argument, in a trial advocacy course students would also learn to apply procedural, substantive and ethical rules of law to prove or defend a cause of action. Moreover, if university law schools fail to contribute to establishing a substantial body of competent trial lawyers, our failure will ultimately take its toll on our system of justice. The quality of courtroom advocacy directly affects the rights of litigants, the costs of litigation, the proper functioning of the justice system, and, ultimately, the quality of justice. Also, traditional law school teaching in legal ethics is necessarily abstract and a-contextual. It can be effective at providing instruction in the law of lawyering, but it is seldom as productive when it comes to examining more subtle questions. The university trial advocacy course is the ideal forum in which to raise ambiguous and textured ethical issues. Ethics problems cannot be avoided or rationalised, because the student trial lawyer must always make a personal decision. In the ethics classroom, it is all too easy to say what lawyers should do. In the simulated courtroom, students have to show what they have chosen to do. I argue that a university trial advocacy course should not be antithetical to the university mission. Thus, students should be given the opportunity to learn not only "how" to conduct a trial, but also "why" their newly acquired skills should be used in a certain way, and "what" effect the use of that skill could have. Through ...
It is a sad fact that at most university law schools in South Africa, a student can graduate without ever having set foot in a courtroom, and without ever having spoken to, or on behalf of, a person in need of advice or counsel. The past several years have witnessed a swelling chorus of complaints that the current LLB curriculum produces law graduates who were "out of their depth" in practice. My purpose is to make a case for the inclusion in the LLB curriculum of a course in trial advocacy. This endeavour of necessity invokes the broader debate over the educational objectives of a university law school – a debate memorably framed by William Twining as the two polar images of "Pericles and the plumber". My thesis is that the education of practising lawyers should be the primary mission of the university law school. The first part of this contribution is a response to those legal academics who hold that the role of the law school is to educate law students in the theories and substance of the law; that it is not to function as a trade school or a nursery school for legal practice. With reference to the development of legal education in the United States, I argue that the "education/training" dichotomy has been exposed as a red herring. This so-called antithesis is false, because it assumes that a vocational approach is necessarily incompatible with such values as free inquiry, intellectual rigour, independence of thought, and breadth of perspective. The modern American law school has shown that such so-called incompatibility is the product of intellectual snobbery and devoid of any substance. It is also often said that the raison d'être of a university legal education is to develop in the law student the ability "to think like a lawyer". However, what legal academics usually mean by "thinking like a lawyer" is the development of a limited subset of the skills that are of crucial importance in practising law: one fundamental cognitive skill – analysis – and one fundamental applied skill – legal research. We are not preparing our students for other, equally crucial lawyering tasks – negotiating, client counselling, witness interviewing and trial advocacy. Thinking like a lawyer is a much richer and more intricate process than merely collecting and manipulating doctrine. We cannot say that we are fulfilling our goal to teach students to "think like lawyers", because the complete lawyer "thinks" about doctrine and about trial strategy and about negotiation and about counselling. We cannot teach students to "think like lawyers" without simultaneously teaching them what lawyers do. An LLB curriculum that only produces graduates who can "think like lawyers" in the narrow sense ill-serves them, the profession and the public. If the profession is to improve the quality of the services it provides to the public, it is necessary for the law schools to recognise that their students must receive the skills needed to put into practice the knowledge and analytical abilities they learn in the substantive courses. We have an obligation to balance the LLB curriculum with courses in professional competence, including trial advocacy – courses that expose our students to what actually occurs in lawyer-client relationships and in courtrooms. The skills our law students would acquire in these courses are essential to graduating minimally-competent lawyers whom we can hand over to practice to complete their training. The university law school must help students form the habits and skills that will carry over to a lifetime of practice. Nothing could be more absurd than to neglect in education those practical matters that are necessary for a person's future calling.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
Contact Info
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Product
Resources
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2025 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.
