Lawyering Skills: Finding their Place in Legal Education

Abstract

In “Pericles and the Plumber”, Twining observed that any working theory of legal education had to contend with the fact that certain functional distinctions had evolved into rigid dichotomies: that education should be separated from training, that academic be isolated from practical, that theory be divorced from practice, that liberal education be distinct from vocational training, and that law be sequestered from other disciplines. More recently, it has become apparent that conceptions of legal education have also been inhibited by its segregation into three distinct stages: the academic, the vocational and continuing legal education. In light of such divisions, it is not surprising that the traditional objectives of legal education have been subjected to rigorous scrutiny in recent years and that reviews such as the 1987 Pearce Report on Australian Law schools concluded that legal education was both insufficiently practical and insufficiently theoretical.