The omnipresence of change has been singled out as posing an important challenge to law, both in theory and in practice, throughout its history. Arguably, the most efficient method of adapting the law to constant changes is legal education. Recent changes in the global arena have added to the complexity of the expected role of future legal talents, requiring them to acquire not only a profound knowledge of local and global laws but also a variety of legal as well as non-legal skills. This article presents some of the principal challenges faced by law schools and legal education in the world of today. These challenges are then explored using the example of a new Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree programme in Chinese Law and Global Legal Studies in the English Language that will be offered by the Faculty of Law of the University of Macau in Macao, China.

I applied to law school as a means to an end. To “fix the system,” to make a difference, to advocate for meaningful change that improves health and well-being of others. Charity Scott accomplished, in her academic career, what I have not. At least thus far, I have chosen to follow a different path, dipping in and out of my original mission. Charity, by contrast, was focused and centered, never deviating from her integrity, purpose, kindness, advocacy, and brilliance. She gracefully married the intellectual enterprise of legal education with an unwavering mission to improve individual lives — of students, colleagues, clients, practitioners, and public servants. She was among pioneers in the health law field. She pioneered the medical-legal partnership model. She made a difference.

With the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE) having been introduced in 2021 the training of solicitors has changed. But what impact will its legal research assessment have on their ability to do this sort of work? Here Greg Bennett, who works at BPP in London – where in addition to being a law librarian he is also studying the LPC – gives an overview of the situation and outlines his own concerns.

As law graduates wield significant influence in public life, law schools’ responsibility for cultivating students’ civic capacities and dispositions remains an important but often neglected project. Taking up this project, this article traces a thread of deliberative democratic aspirations within legal education scholarship and explores the potential of participation within law schools’ own political processes for realising these ideals. To do so, it examines law students’ experiences of an experiment with deliberative democracy’s leading institutional innovation – the deliberative mini-public – and demonstrates the ways in which participation fostered deliberative capacities, a more collective orientation, and increased confidence. Ultimately, the article illustrates the mutually reinforcing nature of civic and legal education, affirms law schools’ broader role within society and offers both theoretical and practical insights into the place of democratic innovation within the law school.

The paper reports the findings of over a decade of pioneering, award-winning fieldwork which has explored how workplace experience, if embedded successfully in different stages of legal education, can accelerate the ‘speed to capability’ and skills development of early career lawyers. The benefits from initial experiments of graduate-level work placements carried out by the authors since 2008 are presented. The paper then explores the findings from almost 10 years of creating year-long work placements for law undergraduates, assessing student skill growth, and the impact of the work placements on degree results and employment outcomes, before and during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Three academic and one law firm librarian, Susan Boyle, Virginia Conrick, Pattie Punch, and Ann O'Sullivan collaborated to create a ‘Lawyering Toolkit’. It was devised to support learners on the legal lifecycle from higher education to the corporate sphere and beyond. Arranged by skills level, it was imagineered via the online BIALL Irish Group meetings during the Covid pandemic. Learning steps were visually scaffolded in LibGuides to build a quick reference platform. This article describes how the Toolkit proof-of-concept developed through experiential reflection and shared discussion. It tracks the construction of a prototype to presentation at BIALL Conference 2022 and incorporates feedback from the conference and the BIALL Irish Group. It is envisaged that the Lawyering Toolkit will ensure a more collaborative and consistent approach to legal information literacy in the Republic of Ireland.

This paper makes a case for the integration of compulsory climate change topics across the core law curriculum. It argues that the most persuasive rationale for this is based in climate legal obligations and institutions, and a clear-eyed perception of climate risk, rather than the sustainability agenda. To this end, the paper outlines efforts taken to ‘mainstream’ climate change and environmental law education in a core course of the LLB degree – land law. An empirical study sought to evaluate the students’ engagement with these materials, and their broader views concerning climate change and their legal education. The paper critically evaluates the course and the results of the empirical study. It concludes that students want to be, and should be, taught climate law and the climate context of law as part of their prescribed learning throughout the core curriculum, rather than as optional or elective content.

New Private Law Theory (“NPLT”) offers itself as almost a natural fit for legal education and in particular—I argue—legal education in the climate crisis. Yet, the world climate hardly features in the book and its impressive resource list. Without claiming to fill any existing gaps in the book, the Article seeks to articulate NPLT’s relevance to sustainable legal education and at the same time tease out what facing the, social, fact of the climate crisis would add to NPLT’s already rich framework.

Hong Kong society has put family-friendly workplace policies under serious discussion, but the investigation of the views of employers remains insufficient. Adopting the structure-agency paradigm, this study used survey data to examine how structural constraints in business and the subjective world of individual employers influence their support to paid family leave. We found that industry categories were significantly associated with employers’ support but not the size of their enterprises. Employers’ personal stereotypes of family caregivers and their awareness of relevant laws did not exert significant independent effects on their policy support, but the significant interaction of the two suggested that employers with knowledge of regulations were less likely to formulate attitudes towards paid family leave based on their own stereotypes. Policy practices therefore need to consider the rationality of employers in the local contexts of Hong Kong, and aim to integrate legal education with de-stigmatisation of family caregivers in advocacy programs.

This Special Issue highlights the most recent socio-legal research related to the mitigation, if not the elimination, of the threat of anthropogenic disasters in Asia and beyond. The drafts of these papers were originally presented at the Presidential Session on “The Anthropocene and the Law in Asia” at the Fourth Asian Law and Society Association (ALSA) Conference held in the vibrant city of Osaka, Japan in December 2019. The timing of this particular session, the first of its kind to be held at an ALSA Conference, turned out to be somewhat prophetic, in that two anthropogenic catastrophes—the historic zoonotic pandemic and the cataclysmic wild bushfires—had just begun to strike in December in Wuhan, China and in New South Wales, Australia, respectively. The novel coronavirus pandemic would kill more than 1 million people in the following months, after infecting more than 40 million across the globe. The Australian wild bushfires killed and displaced more than 3 billion animals, becoming the worst wildfire ever recorded in the world. Since that last ALSA Conference in December 2019, multiple anthropogenic disasters have hit various regions in Asia and across the world. The papers in this Special Issue examine various impacts of anthropogenic disasters and propose innovative socio-legal strategies to mitigate them. Included are arguments for the proposal of new legal education curricula and innovative pedagogy on environmental law and the exploration of an international multidisciplinary teaching framework in reconsidering and reshaping human-centric legal education. Also proposed is the development of a robust Earth Jurisprudence based on the adoption of the Rights of Nature principles, while moving away from the Euro-American exploitive view of nature as commodified properties. Additionally proposed is the establishment of a land-based, topological jurisprudence that incorporates the nuanced narratives of indigenous voices in dealing with the threat of human-induced ecological and environmental disasters in the years ahead.

The scale and urgency of the consequences of the Anthropocene for human civilization call for comprehensive responses from human societies. As leaders in law, law schools have a role in helping their respective societies respond to the impacts of the Anthropocene. The present analysis discusses potential approaches to help law schools in Asia integrate the Anthropocene into their legal education curricula. Drawing upon existing legal education literature regarding issues of content, teaching tools, curriculum placement, and subject status as a law topic, the analysis explores the potential issues facing law schools in the adoption of the Anthropocene as a component of learning. The analysis then addresses the particular contextual sociocultural, economic, and political circumstances likely to challenge the integration of the Anthropocene into Asian law schools. The conclusion finishes with directions for future research.