As we noted on May 1st, the legal profession in America spends Law Day congratulating itself. In Australia, lawyers spend Law Week seriously working to make the profession and the entire justice system operate “efficiently and in the public interest.”
In opening Law Week activities for New South Wales on Monday, Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) President Prof. David Weisbrot emphasized that “the key to ensuring a healthy legal culture . . . begins with improved legal education, emphasising ‘soft skills’ such as communications, negotiation and dispute resolution.” According to an ALRC Press Release, Weisbrot said:
[A]n Australian Academy of Law should be established “as a high priority, to bring together the various strands of an increasingly fragmented profession—judges, barristers, large firm solicitors, small firm solicitors, professional associations, students and academics—to focus attention on issues of professional identity, ethics and public service.”
An article from Australian News (Laws Schools Out of Touch, 19 May 04, via law.com NewsWire In Brief) notes Weisbrot’s belief that “the level of repetitive detail” was turning eager young students into time-servers late in their degrees, and explains (emphasis added):
Professor Weisbrot . . . said a recent study by the commission, Managing Justice, found that while the profession had changed dramatically, the teaching of it was still too much “chalk and talk“.
Universities needed to focus more on “professional ethics, dispute resolution, negotiations, client interviewing, working with teams [and] having a greater identification with client interests”, Professor Weisbrot told the HES.
“If what you’re doing is teaching law students to remember rules from cases, you’re not giving them much of an intellectual skill. You’d be better off teaching them the people stuff and then teaching them how to do all the legal research they need to do to find the law in every particular context.
Professor Weisbrot said he hoped an academy, to be modeled on national academies of science and social science, would be up and running in about three months. ethicalEsq envied the Australian ability to achieve legal reforms quickly in a posting last August.