Legal education and ballet: an unexpected pas de deuxMyrto Leivadarou
Legal education has been structured around traditional doctrinal analysis and the case method. However, educating students to “think like a lawyer” requires more than mastering traditional legal skills; it also calls for creativity, adaptability, and imagination. This article reimagines legal pedagogy through the lens of ballet, a discipline that embodies the perfect balance between discipline and expressive artistry. Just as in a pas de deux, two dancers maintain distinct identities while moving in harmony, legal education must strike a balance between legal precision and legal creativity.
Building on this analogy, the article introduces pedagogical strategies such as embodied learning, frequency-building combined with improvisation, kinaesthetic empathy, and the educator as choreographer. These methods cultivate both doctrinal mastery and imaginative engagement. By adopting this model, legal education can move beyond rigidity and prepare lawyers who are technically proficient, empathetic, creative, and responsive to the complex realities of law in society.
Claire Archbold; Conor McCormick
This article examines the development and delivery of The Practice of Public Law in Northern Ireland (POPL), which is an advanced undergraduate module designed to offer an authentic, ethically informed experience of public law in practice within a jurisdiction where the government legal service plays a central role. The article positions this initiative within the limited literature on pracademia in legal education, noting that public law from a governmental perspective is an unexplored site of clinically inspired pedagogy. Drawing on the Carnegie Report’s call for the integration of legal knowledge, skills, and professional identity, as well as several sources of legal ethics principles, the paper explores how such frameworks can inform curriculum design in politically sensitive legal environments. Employing a reflective, co authored methodology that integrates scholarly and practitioner perspectives, it offers a contextualised account of the module’s pedagogical distinctiveness and the challenges of balancing realism with professional and curricular constraints. These perspectives are nested in the unique circumstances of Northern Ireland, where constitutional law, administrative law, and the politics of a divided society intersect with civil service and legal professional values. The paper goes on to make a broader claim about the value of carefully designed experiential learning as a means of fostering professional ethics and governmental literacy among law students, and the jurisdictionally transferable potential of these features.
Belle Guo
This paper examines the possibility and feasibility of role play as a pedagogical tool or even an assessment tool in enhancing student participation in company law learning. Mooting has been widely used in legal education. However, the day-to-day operations of companies and the decision-making of companies do not always generate disputes that need the court’s intervention or to be solved by the court. Companies need legal advice on corporate governance compliance and strategies to enhance corporate governance efficiency, which are generally provided by company non-litigation lawyers. Company non-litigation lawyers’ skills cannot be simply trained through traditional mooting. In this regard, this paper conducted an action research project with students taking the LW51007 Corporate Governance module at Dundee Law School — a role play of one simulated listed company’s corporate governance evaluation. Based on the practice and the feedback, it is concluded that role play can be an effective pedagogical tool for corporate legal issues surrounding various stakeholders in a corporate setting, such as shareholders, directors, and outside creditors. It is a good student participation and engagement strategy. However, there is no clear conclusion concerning role play as an assessment tool.
Michael H Meissner
Financial law has been indispensably embedded into UK legal education during the last 15 years. On-campus and online programmes reflect a growing need for specialist finance lawyers globally. It is a booming, but specialised area of law without agreed foundations for how we are teaching financial law. Drawing on authentic learning and constructive alignment theories, this article suggests a triangulation of metacognition, financial literacy and online education as novel approaches. Such financial law pedagogy focuses on metacognition and financial literacy as structuring principles for the students’ learning. Further, this method draws on financial education concepts developed in the EU and UK with convergent roots. The outcome is new classroom approaches connecting the principles of financial law with its practice. The digital transformation, accelerated by Covid-19, has encouraged UK universities to expand their financial law teaching and offer fully online taught programmes. Despite regulatory divergence post-Brexit, the EU’s supranational dimension with its unique Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) remains a cornerstone of the UK curriculum. Financial law with its dichotomy of regulation and private law stands out as a key example of the changing nature of 21st century legal education: combining financial literacy and metacognition as pedagogical models against the backdrop of integrating online learning theory.
Sampo Mielityinen; Aurora Fifield; Heidi Hyytinen
This study explores the development of law students’ generic skills in inquiry-based learning, as well as the interrelations between generic skills, self-efficacy beliefs and sense of belonging. The article also examines the association between students’ mode of attendance and their experiences, comparing those studying law onsite and online. The data (N=64) were collected through a survey from a hybrid first-year law course in the University of Eastern Finland Law School, and analysed using factor analysis and qualitative content analysis. Students’ scores on learning generic skills, self-efficacy beliefs and sense of belonging were high. All generic skills studied – critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and self-regulation – correlated positively to each other. Students participating in teaching onsite had higher scores on sense of belonging compared to the online students. Students’ experiences of learning generic skills or self-efficacy beliefs did not differ by their mode of attendance. Several aspects of inquiry-based learning were considered useful for developing generic skills, including teamwork, research-oriented activities and interaction. The results imply that inquiry-based learning is an effective way to support law students’ generic skills, already during first-year studies. With careful pedagogical implementation, the learning experience may be positive even for online students. However, their sense of belonging requires specific attention.
Joseph Hassid; George Maniatis; Michael Polemis
This paper examines the value that lawyers in Greece attribute to knowledge of economics and business methods, identifying the legal fields in which it is most useful and the areas of economic and business expertise that support legal practice. Our findings, based on a survey of Greek legal professionals indicate the broad relevance of economics and business methods across various legal fields. Our findings suggest that lawyers benefit most from knowledge of economics for business, market functioning, and competition and antitrust economics, alongside an understanding of law office organisation. Prior advanced education and professional roles also significantly influence perceptions of the usefulness of economics and business methods knowledge. Lawyers with advanced economic education tend to recognise the value of economic knowledge more broadly across all the examined areas of economics. Similarly, business legal advisors view economic knowledge as beneficial to their practice, whereas self-employed legal practitioners tend to assign slightly lower importance to economic knowledge. Legal specialisation emerges as a key factor shaping the perceived usefulness of different areas of economic and business knowledge..These findings offer guidance for curriculum development, particularly for courses in applied economics and business methods aimed at better equipping future lawyers for the contemporary legal environment. .
Antonio Aloisi; Pilar Galeote; Nicolas Parra-Herrera
This paper reconceptualises legal innovation by moving beyond the dominant focus on technology. Although the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping legal practice, the study demonstrates that innovation also depends on work reorganisation, interpersonal skills and ethical judgment. Drawing on a survey of 460 legal professionals in Spain, the research uncovers a striking disconnect: whereas law firms tend to equate innovation with efficiency gains and market expansion, most individual lawyers associate it with the cultivation of relational capacities such as communication, negotiation, and leadership.
Moreover, the impact of automation proves far less dramatic than popular narratives suggest. Digital tools enhance efficiency in routine and process-driven tasks, yet they do not fundamentally diminish the need for human expertise in complex, high-stakes legal work. Digital transformation, therefore, cannot be reduced to the implementation of new technologies; it also requires rethinking how lawyers work, interact, and exercise leadership. To capture this broader understanding, the paper introduces the “TIE Lawyering model”, structured around three interdependent pillars: Technology, Interpersonal skills and Ethics. Under this framework, the most effective lawyers are those who combine technical and legal competence with mental dexterity, emotional intelligence and a sustained commitment to professional integrity.
Ultimately, the paper contends that meaningful innovation in the legal sector must remain human-centred. While AI can streamline processes, it cannot substitute for the distinctly human capacities that define legal practice. Genuine progress lies in leveraging technology to reinforce, rather than displace, the core elements of lawyering—empathy, trust, ethical judgment and effective communication—within a profession grounded in service and discretion.