Abstrakt: |
This paper is based on the Law Teacher of the Year keynote speech delivered at the Association of Law Teachers' Annual Conference in April 2011 in Cardiff, Wales. Some refinement of the ideas expressed then took place and a further presentation formed my inaugural Readership seminar at Nottingham Law School in June 2011. The essence of the speeches was to seek to address the fitness for purpose of the qualifying law degree (QLD) in the context of contemporary legal education, but more recently has focused on the need for the requirements of the QLD better to reflect and promote what is best about law and legal education. Thus, rather than skills being incidental to academic legal study, I suggest that certain discipline-specific cognitive professional skills should replace the foundation subjects in the QLD. This paper concludes with some sample programmes designed to meet legal intellectual professional skills that meet the needs of the law student in the early twenty-first century while respecting institutional autonomy in legal curriculum design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |