Welcome to Beyond Text in Legal Education - a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, as part of its Beyond Text programme.

Below you will find an overview of the project. For key dates (including detailed programs), biographies of the organisers and participants, and a select bibliography, please use the menu on the right.

Please do not hesitate to contact the webmaster, Maksymilian Del Mar, with any queries.

Law is very much a text-based discipline, both in its practice and its education. Thus legal education, both at the tertiary and continuing professional level, has been and continues to be dominated by recourse to textual resources. Law students and legal professionals are taught to learn and understand general rules and principles and apply them to pre-manufactured factual scenarios. This is no different when it comes to the education of legal professional ethics: moral theories are presented as consisting of general axioms that allow students and professionals to rationally resolve traditional problem cases (pre-articulated factual scenarios that are designed to produce moral dilemmas). The pursuit of professional integrity is dominated by promoting the ability to use complex systems of ethical postulates to justify the making of a certain decision in relation to a pre-determined set of facts.

There is no doubt that the development and use of text-based resources allows for the exercise of skills that are important to the ethical development of law students and legal professionals: we acknowledge that learning how to better articulate and justify one’s reasoning by reference to complex systems of normative languages is important. However, the exclusive emphasis on textual resources, on languages and their manipulation, carries with it significant dangers. Such an exclusive focus can be restrictive in that it can result in law students and legal professionals never acquiring the skill of coming to see and recognise the ethical complexity of any given situation; it places at risk their ability to overcome the limitation of the categories with which they are working, particularly when the particular situation itself puts into question the categories that are supposed to deal with it. Coping with this limit requires the exercise of the ethical imagination. Such an exercise enables the person to respond to the complexity and particularity of the situation, and to come up with just and imaginative ways of going forward.

There is a considerable amount of work in this context that has been and continues to be conducted by those who emphasise the value of the ‘literary imagination’ and the use of literature for these purposes. The work of Martha Nussbaum (most prominently in Cultivating Humanity, 1997) stands out in this context, but many others have also contributed. Indeed, Lionel Trilling once famously noted that “for our time the most effective agent of the moral imagination is the novel” (The Liberal Imagination, 1950). Some of this work has found its way into the post-professional education programs of major law firms, principally in the United States. One example of the latter is the professional development program being conducted at Gardere Wynne Sewell LLP by one of our key collaborators, Randy Gordon, a Partner at the firm.

Our view is that while the invocation of the literary imagination in this context is important, it is still too heavily text-based. What we want to do is to create a space where the ethical imagination can be inculcated and the movement beyond can be experienced in non-textual ways. We want to create a space where there will be opportunities for learning ’through the body’, and thereby to investigate the unique kind of knowledge (known in the literature as “embodied knowledge”) that may emerge from this improvisatory practice. This space would take the form of workshops we will arrange, lead by artists from dance (Keren Ben-Dor, a key collaborator) and the visual arts (Alicja Rogalska, a key collaborator), where participants will be involved in the production of visual and movement-based artwork. Such a space would therefore be both literal as well as metaphorical, and we envisage holding at least some of the workshops in the University’s Talbot Rice Art Gallery (“the Gallery”), so that the dance and art components can be integrated. The holding of workshops in the Gallery will be facilitated by the involvement of Zoe Fothergill, Curator, Education and Development, at the Gallery, and one of our key collaborators on this project.

Although the ethical capacities of art have been debated extensively ever since Plato’s well-known argument for censorship in The Republic, and received, from the pedagogical perspective, its most prominent advocate in John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934; a contribution that has not been forgotten, even if it has been neglected: see, for example, Chapter 7, “The Moral Artist”, of Steven Fesmire’s John Dewey and the Moral Imagination, 2003), we have been able to find no evidence of an investigation into the possible uses of non-textual resources in tertiary and legal professional education. Once again, even though there have been numerous works that acknowledge the need for the cultivation of the ethical imagination by legal (and other) officials (very notable here is Thomas McCollough’s The Moral Imagination and Public Life, 1991) policy-oriented discussion by reference to non-textual resources tends to be ignored within contemporary legal pedagogical literature. Finally, although the relationship between law and art has received some theoretical attention, we have been unable to find any extensive discussion of the practical relevance of that theoretical discussion on legal education policy.

The collaboration between legal scholars, legal professionals, and legal education policy-makers in the United States and the United Kingdom is also very timely. The United States is currently undergoing a major revision of legal education policy. An extensive report, Educating Lawyers, published last year (2007) by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, criticises the American legal education system for failing to take the development of professional integrity seriously. One of the key collaborators on this project, Maksymilian Del Mar, who has been involved in professional ethics education reform at the Queensland Law Society (Australia), presented a paper as part of the project at a major international conference (entitled “The Future of Legal Education”) in Atlanta, Georgia, dedicated to discussing the appropriate response to be made by law schools in the United States to this criticism. Several key figures in legal education policy in the United Kingdom also presented papers at the conference, including Professor Paul Maharg, whose recent book, Transforming Legal Education: Learning and Teaching the Law in the Early Twenty-first Century (2007), endorses John Dewey’s defence of experiential learning, and is one among a number of recent publications calling for reform in the UK legal education system. That professional development policy makers in major law firms would welcome input from the visual and movement-based arts has been evident to us by the considerable amount of interest expressed by professional development partners in this project, e.g., interest received from Jim Moser, Head of Training at Dundas Wilson (major Scottish law firm), who is participating in the project.

Aside from the theoretical and policy literature, the practice of using non-textual resources for pedagogical purposes, and in particular for persons with no prior familiarity or experience with art, has clearly been a major preoccupation of art galleries, community art organisations and some freelance artists for a long time. The response received upon an initial presentation of this project at See What You Think, an event held at the Edinburgh College of Art towards the end of 2007, indicated that the interest from the artistic community in this project would be very positive. All three of the key collaborators who will be leading the practice-led workshops – Alicja Rogalska, Keren Ben-Dor and Zoe Fothergill – have experience in conducting workshops for persons not experienced in either the production or appreciation of visual and movement-based arts.

The project does not wish to suggest that non-textual resources should replace textual ones. The project goes beyond text, but does not leave it behind completely. Rather, it will lead to reflection upon the value of non-textual resources in developing ethical perception amongst law students and legal professionals. The project will make available a space for the use of non-textual resources to transform and recreate the limits of categories imposed by texts. In doing so, the project will be innovative, exploratory and provocative. Ultimately, the project will result in the preparation of a policy paper that will be used to hold discussions with tertiary and professional legal education policy makers.

The project is organised into two major workshops: one practice-based workshop held in Edinburgh on 7-8 December 2008, and one reflection workshop held in Edinburgh on 20-21 June 2009. Aside from these two major workshops, other mini-workshops will take place - one already held in Edinburgh on 7 November 2008, and another planned for February 2009. The project will also involve presentations by the key collaborators at international events. Finally, the practice-based workshop will be filmed, leading to a short film or documentary.

The aims of this project are:

1. To investigate the role of affective experience and understanding in highly rationalised systems of thought and practice;
2. To create a space in which legally-trained persons can explore the production and appreciation of visual and movement-based art;
3. To hold a mini-conference, which, via the presentation of papers and ensuing discussion, will facilitate theoretical reflection upon the pedagogical value of non-textual resources;
4. To publish a book, in the form of an edited collection of papers, that will report on and document the theoretical reflections developed in the mini-conference;
5. To produce a website, which will host videos from the visual and movement-based workshops, and include information about the project;
6. To prepare a policy paper for use in dissemination seminars with tertiary and professional legal education policy makers in the UK and the US.
   

1. The production of a website, which will host material from the practice-led workshop;
2. The production of a film from the practice-based workshop;
   
3. The production of a book, which will consist of papers arising out of the reflective workshops; and
   
4. The preparation of a policy recommendations paper for use in dissemination seminars with tertiary and professional legal education policy makers.