Beyond Text in Legal Education

Colette R. Brunschwig

Zenon Bankowski, Maksymilian Del Mar, and Paul Maharg are pleased to invite you to join them in the book project "Beyond Text in Legal Education":

"After an initial positive response from Ashgate, we are currently putting together a more detailed proposal for a two-volume collection of papers. The title of the two-volume collection is Beyond Text in Legal Education, with the first volume subtitled The Moral Imagination and the Legal Life. We would like to invite you to contribute a chapter to Volume I.

The aim of the two volumes as a whole is to reinvigorate legal education, primarily in law schools but also extending to law firms, by introducing the importance and usefulness of pedagogical resources that go beyond text, e.g., resources from the (audio-)visual and movement arts. The second volume is more focused on the use of these resources in developing the moral imagination in law schools and legal service employers. The aim of this first volume, to which we are inviting you to contribute, is to enhance the praxis of legal education, i.e., to learning, teaching and evaluation in any area of the law. It will also contribute to the theory of praxis. Here is a more detailed paragraph on the scope of Volume I, which will give you more context to the book's direction, and extracted from the volume description sent to the publishers:

This book explores the use of non-textual resources in legal education and legal scholarship. The book is not restricted to any area of law, nor to any particular form of going beyond text. For example, it includes contributions that explore different ways of (audio-)visualising legal knowledge, different ways of designing and interacting with spaces for exploring legal issues, as well as different ways of performing a variety of legal problems (e.g., via physical theatre). The premise of the book is that the teaching and research of law can be experienced in ways that do not (only) depend on text, but that have recourse to the full range and diversity of the sensory capacities of teachers, students, professionals and scholars. In that sense, the book also recognises that different persons all have different sensory strenghts and weakness, i.e., that we all experience in different ways (e.g., some may learn better by seeing than others). The book brings together scholars and practitioners from many different fields, including legal education, legal theory, theatre, architecture, the (audio-)visual and movement arts, and others.

We envisage the first volume to have two parts, each part discussing theory and practice. The first part will consist of contributions that will discuss aspects of the pedagogical value of non-textual resources. In the second part contributions will focus on the use of non-textual resources themselves in law schools and legal service employers. Of course, we encourage all contributors - even those who envisage contributing primarily to the first part - to consider how their discussion of the pedagogical value of non-textual resources may be of particular relevance to legal education.

Because we want to encourage the use of non-textual resources as much as possible in this volume we are creating Volume one as an e-book (the second will be in the traditional paper format only). This is a relatively new departure for our publishers and we are still negotiating infrastructure and interface. We have chosen this publishing platform so that your contribution can be as interactive and flexible as possible. It means you will be able to link and embed photographic, graphical, video, interactive narrative, web text, audio and other resources. It is an exciting project, and will make your work much more accessible and searchable on the web than it would otherwise be.

The length of each contribution is expected to be approximately 4,000 words, including footnotes (some leeway as usual is envisaged, but the closer to this approximation the better).

If you would like to contribute, we need you to supply us with a working title, an abstract of 200-300 words, and a short biography (together with your current affiliation; the biography should be no more than 100 words). We would be grateful if you could please supply this to us before the end of January 2010.

The final version of the paper would not be due till after the summer in 2010, i.e., at the end of August.

We very much hope you can join us in this project."  

Zenon Bankowksi (see http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/staff/zenonbankowski_21.aspx)

Maksymilian Del Mar (see https://applicationspub.unil.ch/interpub/noauth/php/Un/UnPers.php?PerNum=1069033&LanCode=37&menu=coord)

Paul Maharg (see http://www.law.strath.ac.uk/staff/details.aspx?id=8)

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