“On teaching students to ‘act like a lawyer’: What sort of lawyer?”

Abstract

Teaching professionalism is a challenge for educators in any course of professional education. It is also often very confronting for students. In legal education, both students and teachers can find the concepts foreign because of the focus on analytical and logic skills and the lack of application to ‘real life’ requirements of legal practice. This paper investigates the intersection of clinical teaching and professional responsibility. It investigates the issue of teaching students to “act like a lawyer” and asks the fundamental question: “What sort of lawyer do we want students to act like?” In presenting this paper, it is accepted that, certainly in Australia, about 50% of law graduates end up in non-legal practicing, but related professions – and thus an approach to teaching needs to be developed which deals with this reality.