For Better or For Worse?: 21st Century Legal Education

Abstract

Significant positive change has occurred in legal education since the Pearce Report was published in 1987. This paper will canvass those changes and, in particular, discuss how legal education has responded to the various sectoral pressures that have impacted upon it since Pearce, while more recently also adjusting to a demanding new national research agenda and commercialisation imperative to generate soft income. In examining how legal educators have sought to manage the challenges of maintaining quality and academic integrity in the face of dynamic change, the paper will first consider the traditional transmission model of legal education, by way of a realistic appraisal of "how it was back then", and then come forward to the 21st century to examine "where we have got to" with the reconceptualisation of learning and teaching in legal education. In so doing the paper hopes to provide the basis for an honest assessment of the state of modern Australian legal education.