I was recently preparing a workshop on the phenomenon of using so called “essential questions” as a tool for achieving better results in legal teaching. Such questions not only hook learners. But these questions also serve as guiding tools for learners in classes, courses and sometimes even whole curricula. These overarching questions help students to focus and as such to fascilitate thoughtful learning. The spiralling potential of these questions support students during all levels of climbing the learning ladder. In later blogs I will elaborate on “essential questions” as legal learning tools.
Then I remembered a lecture by prof. Harry Arthurs, one of the great scholars on legal education. He stressed the duty of law school being to deliver not only practice ready lawyers for today’s profession. But these schools should also deliver tomorrow’s lawyers with the capacity to deal with the rapidly and radically changing circumstances of legal practice.
Recently, Prof. Arthurs was asked to assess how important McGill University’s introduction of a “transsystemic” law program in 1999 was. His answer: “I think it’s one of the most dramatic changes in English-language legal education in 100 years,”.
I became curious about this program. It turns out, transsystemic law attempts to teach students about the law not from the perspective of any one specific jurisdiction, but from the perspective of many. McGill remains the only law school in the world that imbues this principle into the fabric of its curriculum.
Practically, this means McGill students graduate with both common and civil law degrees. But if you believe the scholars, the consequences for legal education are much more profound. Students can critically look at a legal problems from so many more perspectives than ordinary law students have learned to do. This approach to legal education is becoming an entirely new standard for legal education: studying and applying law in its many permutations. It is becoming a model for other law schools in its approach of teaching law.
For teaching professors at McGill will bring together multiple legal traditions to bear on every subject and will have to find sources from around the world. It forces lecturers and students to alike to reflect on and answer the question of what it is that the law as a phenomenon really means in theory and practice in this global society. This intellectual process deepens their true understanding of practicing law.
That is exactly what the tool of “essential questions” tries to achieve: deepen true understanding of a legal phenomenon by intellectually penetrating its core and actively exploring its many layers. There is more to come on essential questions.