Time To Reimagine Law School And Legal Education In The Digital Age?

Technological progress will continue to fundamentally alter how we relate to each other and to our work, necessarily shaping the future of legal education. The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare not only the social and racial inequities in society, but also the pedagogical and access to justice inequities embedded in the traditional legal curriculum. While the need to re-envision the future of legal education existed well before the current pandemic, the shifting nature of legal practice as well as technological change and the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have spurred tons of debate and are widely believed to cause massive disruption to the traditional model of law school and legal education across the globe. this has inevitably led many to fundamentally question whether is is now time to adapt to the digital age through the reimagination of law school and legal education?

Where do we currently stand in the debate?

The main difficulty in determining the direction in which legal education is heading, is that different people want to move in different directions. Many traditionalists believe that digitalisation is not sufficiently important to completely change up the traditional model and curriculum of legal education, but that we should hold on to traditional law school as we have been doing for decades. At the same time, the so-called radicals argue that we should completely revolutionise traditional legal education. Those who remain in the middle of this discussion tend to believe that some aspects of traditional legal education should indeed undergo change, while sticking to the traditional core of law school: legal argumentation, legal reasoning, understanding the (structure of the) law, getting access to the law, to understand how to research the law, and then from there making legal arguments. While these elements should form the core of law school and legal education, at the same time we need to better understand digitalisation — how to deal with it from a legal perspective…