Teaching skills for Future Legal Professionals

摘要: The UTS Faculty of Law has recently launched a Legal Futures and Technology major to commence in 2018, the first of its kind in Australia. The major will consist of 30 credit points, comprising of a mix of existing law electives, bespoke law electives such as Disruptive Technologies and two capstone subjects–Technology, Law, Policy and Ethics (Capstone 1) and Applied Project in Law, Innovation and Technology (Capstone 2). The development of the major was informed by concerns articulated in a series of public lectures entitled ‘Legal Futures’ by members of the legal profession and an external advisory group about the kinds of skills legal practitioners may need in the future, including understanding of technologies, legal resources and project management. 1 These concerns about future needs of practitioners have been well articulated in the NSW Law Society’s The Future of Law and Innovation in the Profession report (flip). 2An ongoing question, famously encapsulated by Frank Easterbrook in the 1990s, is whether or not teaching and researching law through the prism of technology is as pointless as teaching law through the category of the horse? 3 There is international recognition that technology has the potential to change how we study, teach, research and practice the law. But can socio-technological change be slotted into existing legal education or can and should we be creating new pedagogical responses to the challenges posed by technological developments? The answer I propose in this article is both. I highlight the way in which the UTS Law Faculty embeds the interface of law and socio-technological change within the …