This reflective practitioner essay asks what it means to teach law ‘as a conversation’ and who is heard as speaking law within that conversation. Drawing on teaching notes from an elite Indian law school writing classroom, the article analyses a staged counter-factual dialogue among four legal thinkers (Nicholas J. McBride, Patricia J. Williams, Kiruba Munusamy and Angela D. Gilmore). ‘Counter-factual pedagogy’ names a method that stages an ‘as-if’ encounter that is structurally unlikely within conventional legal education in order to make institutional defaults newly visible, including neutrality as epistemic rigour, professionalism as merit and doctrinal learning as separable from social power. The article reads the exercise through five literature-informed lenses (voice, neutrality, performance, justice, discomfort). No student quotations, paraphrases or artefacts are reproduced.

This article proposes to centre economic inequality when introducing trusts to law students. The subject is reputedly tedious and gruelling. This can only be compounded, as economic inequality intensifies, by the experiential distance between underprivileged students and the world of trusts. Yet their career prospects, and potential contributions to reducing inequality, can benefit from understanding trusts. The need to engage students in learning the subject, therefore, warrants attention. This article offers a four-step method aimed at promoting engagement by introducing the subject within the context of the familiar social problem of drastic economic inequality. It constructs this method by drawing from Roger Cotterrell’s critical and socio-legal consciousness about trusts.

This article argues that weekly “tiny research assignments” in introductory health law courses promote active learning and deepen student engagement. These focused exercises also build foundational research and communication skills by replacing passive lecture with concise, student-driven investigation tied to each week’s topic.

The integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) is reshaping traditional legal pedagogy by introducing new dimensions to research, drafting, and personalized learning. Despite its transformative potential, the application of GAI in legal education remains promising and is accompanied by such challenges as algorithmic bias, privacy concerns, and the generation of fabricated or inaccurate content—issues that continue to divide scholarly opinion on its adoption. With this in mind, the University of Kansas School of Law offered a one-credit, one-hour course on “AI for Lawyers” during the summer of 2025. Along with reproducing the syllabus of the course and some of the professor’s observations, the paper includes an overview of AI and legal pedagogy and some recommendations going forward for integrating AI into law school curricula.

This study presents a mixed-methods analysis of the integration of social justice into legal practice in Hong Kong. While social justice within the legal field is a growing area of interest, research on how it can be enhanced through legal education remains relatively limited. This study aims to explore how higher education law courses can be leveraged to better incorporate social justice principles into contemporary legal practice. The research adopts a mixed-methods approach, including a quantitative analysis of questionnaires completed by 99 current law students in Hong Kong and a thematic analysis of interviews conducted with 33 students and legal professionals in the region. Findings suggest the potential benefits of increasing the emphasis on social justice within law programs at Hong Kong universities. The study also raises important questions about the optimal content and methods for delivering social justice education in legal curricula.

In this paper we introduce a framework for developing children’s legal capability. This is the outcome of an extended period of interdisciplinary research, reflection, and discussion to explore the question of ‘what does a legally capable child look like?’. Initially this question was explored within the context of adult-focused legal capability literature, and we explain how the framework we propose in this paper has been informed by this scholarship. However, we go on to demonstrate how our work breaks new ground not only because of its focus on children, but because we radically reconceptualise legal capability, drawing on a range of interdisciplinary theories. Within the framework we introduce the concept of ‘baseline’ legal capability, and we argue that this addresses the conundrum we identify in the literature, where legal capability is conceptualised as something which those most in need of effective public legal education can never achieve. More generally, we demonstrate how the framework turns traditional ideas about legal education upside down as we ‘decentre’ the law and legal institutions, and instead place the learner at its core.

The Qualifying Law Degree (QLD) resulted in law degrees tending to be similar in design, with compulsory foundation modules at their core. The Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE) represents a significant change to solicitor qualification and potentially frees universities from the constraints of the foundations. There was also speculation that some universities would feel pressure to align undergraduate curricula to the SQE. This paper makes a contribution to knowledge by undertaking the first content analysis of LLB webpages since the SQE’s implementation. The data reveals that: (1) law schools still overwhelmingly require mandatory study of all the foundations; (2) there has been an incremental shift towards vocationalism; (3) a small minority of webpages may be overstating the extent that their LLB prepares students for the SQE; and (4) a significant proportion of webpages contain factually inaccurate or confusing information about programmes or routes to qualification. It confirms an inherent irony: the deregulation of undergraduate solicitor education in England and Wales had led to more vocational alignment than experienced under the previous system but has not resulted in a significant shift away from the foundations. We present a novel explanation as to why this is the case, based on institutional theory and organisational strategic theory.

In this interview Christian Joerges reconstructs his intellectual biography. A childhood marked, like that of his entire generation, by the Second World War, a harsh post-war period and, from an early age, a complex relationship with German identity on the shadow of Nazi crimes. A high school and university education in a Frankfurt where intellectual life is thriving amidst the ruins. And where a young Joerges discovers the beauty of theory thanks to Wiethölter. The experience in the United States where a pluralistic student movement is energised by the opposition to the Vietnam war. The construction of a law faculty in Bremen, with the almost impossible goal of transforming the teaching of law in Germany. The almost 20 years of Florentine experience, in the shadow of history and with the determination to imagine a Europe capable of being progressive. And without omitting reflections on the dark legacies of European law and on ordoliberalism, two phenomena that many European scholars have discovered thanks to Joerges.

In many developing countries, law students face challenges in accessing authoritative legal resources, including statutes, case law, and journal articles, due to the high costs of subscription-based databases such as LexisNexis, HeinOnline, and Westlaw. In Nigeria, additional subscription online resources are available, including LawPavilion, Legalpedia, and Compulaw. These platforms are all rich in content and currency; however, they are often unaffordable for both law students and law libraries. To overcome these challenges, there are many initiatives and movements administered by government institutions, universities, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that provide access to both primary and secondary sources of law. Included in the latter group are the Legal Information Institutes (LIIs), Google Scholar, the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), and Justia. This paper examines the role of free legal databases as an alternative for law students and how these freely accessible platforms can support the access gaps that subscription-based legal research tools have often created. The study is conceptual in nature, with reliance on existing literature and analysis of freely available legal information resources to support legal education.

Global challenges such as climate change demand transnational responses, including from legal clinics. Building on earlier community legal clinic and international human rights clinic models, transnational legal clinics combine the objectives of legal clinics with the framework of transnational law to work across domestic and international planes. This article focuses on a Canadian–Peruvian legal clinic collaboration to research and draft an amicus curiae brief for landmark climate litigation in Peru. While the global north–south axis of collaboration raises structural challenges, adopting a transnational approach unites participants around the principle of solidarity and decentres assumptions about expertise. A transnational approach also contributes to the progressive development of law, in this case by offering insights into remedies in climate litigation. Overall, we argue that transnational legal clinic collaboration can spur participants’ reflective learning and make substantive contributions to the growing number of climate cases.