"Transforming legal education"

This modest little title belongs to an excellent book just published (Ashgate, 2007) by Prof Paul Maharg of Glasgow Graduate School of Law. Paul is one of the most innovative thinkers around on legal education and his work at Strathclyde on creating transactional learning environments (teaching through simulated legal transactions) is really world class. This book reflects on a lot of that experience, but does much more in terms of developing an alternative theory of legal education pedagogy - which incidently involves linking the construction of the legal realist curriculum at Columbia in the 1920s, ethics education at Edinburgh University in the eighteenth century; and the practices of the mediaeval "Glossators" of Roman Law!

Perhaps even more interesting is the experiment that goes with the book. Paul and a number of colleagues have just launched a wiki which will form the basis of a community of practice for what Paul calls the "Transforming Initiative". I've just signed up to it, though blowed if I know quite what I'm going to do with it - yet! If you're interested in the project, go to Paul's Transforming Legal Education website - linked here