Prospects and Challenges of Legal Education: Jordanian Experience

Legal System in Jordan

Jordan follows the Civil Law System, which is characterized by an active codification process. There are three constitutional authorities in Jordan, namely the Parliament, the Government and the Judiciary. ¹ The Parliament is the body responsible for enacting laws. Laws in Jordan are derived from different historic sources. ² For example, the Commercial and Criminal Codes are derived from the Egyptian Law, which has, in turn, been emanated from the relevant French Laws, whereas the Civil Code is highly influenced by Islamic Law. ³ The Personal Status Code, however, is totally derived from Sharia Law while Companies Law has been largely influenced by the English Law. ⁴

The Government is appointed by the King and is responsible for implementing the laws. In the absence of the Parliament, the Government is entitled to enact temporary laws, provided that they are discussed and approved by the Parliament as soon as it convenes. ⁵ The Judiciary is composed of two layers: First Instance Courts and Appeal Courts. ⁶ The rulings of the Appeal Courts can be revised by a higher ranking court called the Cassation Court, ⁷ which only watches the correctness of the application of the law rather than reviewing the facts of the case. ⁸ Precedents are not binding in the sense that courts are not bound by its own previous or other rulings. ⁹ In addition, lower courts are not under a statutory obligation to follow the higher courts’ judgements in similar cases. ¹⁰

There are some special courts having a particular mandate by virtue of their special laws, such as Income tax Court, ¹¹ the Grand Crimes Court, ¹² the Higher Court Justice ¹³ and, most recently, the Constitutional Court. ¹⁴

The Role of the Ministry of Higher Education and the Higher Education Accreditation Commission

Legal education in Jordan is regulated by several legislations. ¹⁵ On the one hand, there is the Higher Education and the Higher Education Accreditation Commission Laws. On the other hand, there are the Public Universities and Private Universities Laws, along with a special law for each university. Each of these laws is supported by a number of regulations and instruments that facilitate its implementation.

Generally speaking, these laws define the broader policy, concept and function of higher education in the country for all teaching disciplines. The Ministry of Higher Education supervises and regulates universities through the Higher Education Council. For example, one of the most important roles of the Ministry of Higher Education is the regulation and undertaking of the admission process itself. Here, it receives applications from students from all over the country and distributes admitted students across public universities in accordance with the admission policy it sets out. ¹⁶

Higher private education in Jordan started only in the past century during the early 1990s. ¹⁷ The Ministry, through the Higher Education Council, plays the role of the licensing authority for all private universities, including the licensing of teaching disciplines for each university, as well as the number of students allowed for each discipline. ¹⁸ In order to best achieve its mission, the Ministry has created the Accreditation Department, whose main responsibility is to monitor the extent to which each faculty is complying with the relevant accreditation regulations for all teaching disciplines. ¹⁹ In 2007, the Accreditation Department was separated from the Ministry to become an independent body having, by virtue of its special law, autonomy and financial independence. Now known as the ‘Higher Education Accreditation Commission’, it reports directly to the prime minster. ²⁰ In 2007, the National Strategy for Higher Education and Scientific Research was issued, thereby making public universities as well as private ones subject to the accreditation process. ²¹

The mechanism according to which the Higher Education Accreditation Commission monitors the compliance of law schools with relevant laws and regulations is through the formulation of technical inspection committees composed of two law professors from different law schools with an administrative assistant from the Higher Education Accreditation Commission. ²² The author of this chapter has participated in two similar committees, once as a committee member and the other time as a head of the committee. Here are some observations on this process: first, it does not seem that there is a unified criterion for the composition of such committees or for appointing committee members to carry out the inspection. A law professor can well be appointed to such committees, no matter whether he or she has an interest, experience or even knowledge on how to enhance legal education.

For law schools, the inspection encompasses one arranged field trip to the law school subject to accreditation, whereby the committee reviews the study plan of the law school to make sure that it covers all areas of law teaching. Each law school must satisfy the preset students’ capacity ratio, in the sense that there must be one law professor for not more than 35 students. This ratio is subject to verification by the committee. As for academic ranking of faculty staff, there must be at least one associate professor. Here, the committee is authorized to look at employment contracts of each staff member to make sure that his or her service at the school will last for a reasonable time, and that he or she is being offered a reasonable salary, since these elements are very important for sustainability. The committee then inspects the legal library and other facilities at the school such as the moot court room or the computer laboratory. At the end of the inspection exercise, the committee writes a report and recommends whether or not to accredit the law school for a certain period of time, which is normally three years. The report may recommend that the inspected law school be requested to perform certain remedial measures to fix any outstanding issue. ²³ As is clearly seen, this process is very general and applies to all disciplines at the university. The Accreditation Committee only judges documents and papers rather than assessing the real quality of education.

One must admit here that all regulations adhered to in the course of the accreditation process are idealistic and ambitious in terms of setting out optimum quality assurance for higher education and a transparent accreditation methodology. The regulations do indeed talk about skills, critical thinking research and graduating professionals; they do require each discipline to clearly set out its objectives, methods of teaching and the set of inputs and output skills required. ²⁴

However, the main problem with accreditation is in its generality. The same standards are applied across all disciplines of knowledge. Standards are general by their nature. Each university works hard to meet the criteria provided for by such standards. In practice, no university in the history of higher education was closed or a discipline was suspended. To sum up, accreditation is a mere formal process whereby accreditation committees through inspection verify documents submitted by the university applying for accreditation, without going into the merits of the education process itself.

Curriculum and Faculties Study Plans

In general, law students study 141 credit hours; those hours are classified as mandatory courses and elective ones. ²⁵ Each law school in Jordan has its own study plan for the degree of law. This article puts together the most important difficulties that are faced during curriculum development, which in turn affects the outcome of the law faculties.

First of all, a quick look at all study plans of law schools in Jordan gives the impression that they all have the same colour and no substantial differences exist between them, which in turn makes no difference in the quality of graduates in terms of skills. ²⁶ This results in the lack of competition between the graduates based on the kind of education they receive. This may be due to the fact that all law schools take study plans from each other.

It must be admitted that study plans are reviewed every few years by a special committee within the faculty, called the ‘Curriculum Committee’. However, such a review is only confined to the addition of some elective courses or making a shift between mandatory and elective courses and are far from being a revolutionary one. Adding a new course that is taught for the first time is something that can hardly happen. Furthermore, elective courses are designed to give law students the opportunity to choose some legal courses that match their interests. However, this objective is not met in reality, because even though each study plan contains a large number of elective courses, only five to six are in practice offered by the faculty and repeated over the years while other elective courses are not offered at all. One may thus conclude that those courses are elective to the faculty, but not to the students.

Another problem here is that the content of existing courses is not normally changed by either adding new concepts or removing others due to local, regional or international issues that affect one’s daily life. This makes many courses seem disconnected from real life, against the very basic theme that law touches all life aspects.

The study plans set by law faculties value a theoretical approach and neither does it help in improving one’s skill nor does it prepare law students for their profession. Only few law schools in Jordan have recently started teaching Legal Research and Writing (LRW). Thus, courses and skills such as negotiation, interviewing and drafting are not taught. Clinics are not yet that popular, and only two law schools have started clinical legal education. Legal Ethics is within the study plan of only two law schools. ²⁷ English language is not taken seriously when teaching law, although it plays a vital role in the legal profession. Even with the fact that some law faculties teach LRW, or Legal English or Legal Ethics, it remains debatable as to whether or not such courses are being taught through a methodology that serves the objectives behind such courses.

Methods of Teaching and Evaluation

Interactive methods of teaching is not normally followed at Jordan law schools, even though some law professors believe that they are doing very well in terms of interactive teaching. The methodology being used here is providing students first with all theoretical information, then an exercise is given to students which relates to the topic in question. Consequently, this method is not used as a tool of teaching, but rather as an activity that follows a traditional lecture. Again, whether or not this can be considered as an interactive legal teaching remains debatable. ²⁸

Genuine interactive teaching at Jordanian law schools remains dependent on an individual’s initiative. Few professors do in fact try to use an interactive method in class, whether it is a case study, problem-solving or a moot court exercise. However, interactive teaching is not incorporated as part of the faculty policy or study plans. There is no monitoring by the faculty administration on how the lecture is being conducted by a professor, since no professor can accept the idea of being watched for some quality assurance or evaluation purposes, while teaching. Most professors consider this as interference in their own business and a breach to what is so-called academic freedom. Furthermore, the way a law professor teaches is not taken into account when considering his or her promotion.

The reasons behind not using interactive techniques in law schools in Jordan can be summarized as follows: first, legal education in Jordan is new; law professors now consist of both old and new people in the field. Old law professors are in fact amongst the pioneers and have been serving since the establishment of the first law school in Jordan. New law professors represent the new generation of young lawyers who have received their primary legal education in Jordan from the old generation, but pursued their higher legal education in the West. However, in the classroom, every professor teaches by the way he or she was originally taught. Naturally, most of the old generation of law professors resists any change in the teaching methodology, thereby confining all attempts to develop the teaching methodology to a few young law professors.

Second, implementing interactive teaching is not an easy task; it takes more time and effort from the law professor, especially when he or she is a newly appointed one. The law professor, therefore, may find it difficult to follow modern techniques in the classroom and prefers to stay with the traditional lecture he or she has been acquainted with for a long time. The above fact brings up the issue of training of law professors in interactive teaching. University higher administration does play a role in terms of training the university professors on methods of teaching. However, it provides one generic training for all university professors regardless of their specialty. In this regard, we can conclude that the special nature of legal education is not taken into account. ²⁹

Third, the quality of the students plays a vital role in challenging the potential of the professors. That is to say, high-quality students tend to argue more with the professor inside the classroom. This spurs the law professor to work more towards improving his or her performance in the classroom, besides encouraging him or her to use unconventional teaching methodology such as: problem-solving techniques, training the students on critical thinking, approaching them by activities and exercises and making them able to conclude the legal concepts instead of being spoon-fed. ³⁰ However, the students may not respond to these ambitious and creative attempts, due to the fact that they are not, in the first place, used to such methods, which in turn causes some frustration to reformist law professors, pushing them back to merely being classic lecturers. Having said that all, the method according to which students are evaluated remains the traditional system of examination, whereby only one skill is measured, which is the capability of memorization.

Expenses and Infrastructure

In this section, an attempt is made to analyze how the severe financial problems that universities in Jordan suffer from affect the quality of legal education. ³¹ First of all, it should be noted that this section applies only to public universities. This does not mean that private law schools are better off in terms of educational development. Even though private universities tend to have financial surplus, their spending on development is limited.

The administration of the university is responsible for spending on all faculties in terms of infrastructure and activities. ³² This results in so many occasions where the administration does not see the high added educational value of spending on some students activities such as participation in regional or international competitions, thereby depriving both students and professors from gaining skills and exposure. Also, this affects the development of some skills needed by the students such as oral presentation and legal writing, arguing, problem-solving and others. Given the huge financial constrains under which Jordanian universities are operating such expenses are not seen as priority.

Spending on other areas such as classroom facilities and electronic databases is also limited. Any project which is supposed to take place at the law school needs some expenses, whatever little. For example, starting a clinic by a faculty requires some expenses such as transportation, stationary, an office for the faculty with a phone, computer and other necessary things. No money is paid by the university on such things. It is not surprising that any approval by universities’ high administration for the start of any new project is quite often conditional upon not burdening the university with any expenses. Given the circumstances, it may not be reasonable to blame the universities for such policies. However, the blame is only for not trying to develop partnerships with local and international bodies that may help universities implement their projects. Such entities and bodies can be the fund givers of such activities; however, the concept of corporate social responsibility, whereby private enterprises finance the activities of law faculties, is not fully mature yet.

One last point relating to financial aspects is that there is an overwhelming feeling amongst law professors that they are underpaid and that their financial status is not inspiring them to be creative in their teaching profession. ³³

Review of Accreditation Standards

To start with, the accreditation task cannot reasonably be assumed by one single body in relation to all disciplines at the same time. Differences between academic disciplines do in reality exist and should be taken into consideration. Therefore, accrediting law schools should be the responsibility of a dedicated legal body. This body can still be under the overall umbrella of the Higher Education Accreditation Commission. The structure of the Higher Education Accreditation Commission should be accordingly changed, whereby the Commission would comprise various specialized departments and each would be dedicated to accrediting a particular university discipline. These specialized departments should enjoy some technical autonomy and be manned with technical staff belonging to the same discipline they aim to accredit. ³⁴

Simultaneously, accreditation process itself must change, as a single field trip to the law schools subject to accreditation in the course of the accreditation process is just insufficient. Staff in charge of accrediting law schools must be familiar with legal education reform trends and they should consequently be chosen on merit. For this purpose, there has to be in place a clear selection criterion whereby solid experience in legal education development, instead of merely adhering to the academic rank or years of experience, should be the basis of the selection process. As for the accreditation process itself, it should be more comprehensive and should contain the following: substance of study plans, methods of teaching, students’ activities, the way a law school chooses to make itself distinct from other law schools and the level of the graduates and their successes in the legal profession. Clearly, these elements can only be verified by a specialized legal body having a qualified team of experts. ³⁵

Moreover, in order to create a positive and healthy competition amongst law schools in the country, as well as to help bridge the gap between public and private law schools, and to motivate all schools to improve their performance, a national ranking system for law schools in Jordan must be established. This system may follow those relevant ones existing in other developed countries.

As for admission policy, the author believes here that there should be only one admission route for all law schools, knowing fully well that this suggestion can be hard to attain in practice as it clashes with social, financial and political local considerations. For example, although it is widely acknowledged that the parallel admission path and other exceptional acceptance routes play a vital role in lowering the quality of graduates, some universities will still advocate the parallel admission path considering its important role in providing with extra financial sources. On the other hand, other exceptional admission schemes are seen as having some social and political merits.

Motivating Law Professors

Law professors are the main pillars in legal education reform. Having said that, there needs to be some incentive for good law professors as a reward for their better performance. Teaching methods must be taken into account when considering a professor’s promotion application. The way a professor teaches and evaluates students no longer needs to remain a professor’s private business. Instead, classrooms must become open for mentoring so that methods of teaching can be evaluated. ³⁶

Law professors have to not only show more interest in student’s activities and in mentoring them, but also engage in guiding students to starting up new educational projects in line with faculty interests and finding finance for the same. In sum, law professors must become creative. Realistically, however, not all law professors will indeed be active, creative, reformist and development believers. Therefore, those who are taking the lead in reform, and spending more time and effort in doing so, must be distinguished from other traditional ones. This distinction can be either monetary, which will be better received by professors, morally or administratively in the sense of relaxing their promotion requirements.

Paradoxically, the idea of hardening promotion conditions to spur professors to be more creative may work as well. If, for example, it has become a condition that in order to apply for a promotion, a law professor needs to clearly show that he or she has carried out some activities that contribute to the development of its faculty, then most law professors in Jordan will try to be creative and efficient, considering that promotion lays at the heart of a professor’s interest and objectives for obvious academic and monetary reasons. All in all, a competitive environment amongst faculty members will start emerging gradually, allowing for real reform process to take place.

Fundamental Changes in the Study Plans for Faculties

Study plans at law schools should not be identical or even very similar to each other. Rather, each faculty must distinguish itself and its graduates, by offering special professional paths for them as well as marking itself with some unique courses. The legal profession now is heading towards specialization; lawyers, judges and legal researchers alike try to concentrate on one area of the law. Such specialization should be reflected in the study plans at law schools; that is to say, each law school must characterize its study plan with certain courses and topics ultimately leading to a distinct specialization. The elements that need to play a role in such a proposed trend for law schools are diverse: the location of the university, the nature of environment and the population’s well-informed understanding of market conditions. To illustrate, if a university is located within an agricultural area, the study plan may focus on agriculture, water and other legal issues, while if it is located in an industrial area, the study plan may concentrate on employment and environmental legal issues and so on. This way, universities can serve the community in a better way, which in the first place is one of the most important objectives of their existence. In turn, this will help labour markets locate and choose law graduates depending on the nature of their demand.

Stamping a law school with a specific field of the law also has another important virtue, being connected with Civil Society Organizations (CSOs). Therefore, partnerships would be established between law schools and CSOs, by which CSOs would support certain activities of one law school as well as provide relevant training to its students. Constructive partnership may also help find job opportunities to law graduates. From law schools’ perspective, this partnership would mean offering certain courses and conducting workshops and activities, which lay within the interest of such CSOs. Building such a bridge between law schools and CSOs is totally missing in Jordan, even though it serves the interest of both law schools and CSOs.

In addition to the above, new skills-oriented courses must be added to the curriculum of law schools. However, even with this, each law school can still choose those sets of skills that it needs to distinguish itself and its graduates from others. Curriculum must reflect the real life and its development whether at local, regional or international arena. At the micro level, already existing courses need to become more flexible whereby new topics within the same course can be incorporated into and absorbed by such courses, without having to devise a new course altogether for each new change in topic. To illustrate, the law professor should no longer restrict himself or herself with the very same content of the course he or she taught, but may instead use their discretion to add new themes, replace, change and omit others within the course items.

Involvement of Judiciary and the Bar in Legal Education

Supposedly, law schools, the Bar and the Judiciary are partners who should work collectively to shape up the future of the legal profession. To start with the admission policy, feedback and statistics coming from both the Judiciary and the Bar should determine in the first place the number of students to be admitted at law schools and whether or not the country needs more law schools to be licensed.

Study plans review should be an area where these three stakeholders cooperate with each other. In reality, lawyers and judges are better placed to recommend which courses and the set of skills that a study plan has to reflect. Being deeply involved in day-to-day law practice, lawyers and judges are more capable of identifying the points of weakness and strength in the performance of law graduates.

Last, teaching some courses at law schools can be best performed by those lawyers and judges who are enjoying a good reputation and having a long experience in legal practice. Universities must, therefore, start treating law teaching similar to teaching in other professional disciplines, such as medicine and pharmacy. Here, practical experience needs to be viewed as a fundamental part of the academic discipline, whereby practising professionals can help in teaching, in addition to doctorate certificates holders. Most importantly, this new approach need not remain an exception, but can rather become the norm and more institutionalized at the faculty policy levels. In addition, it should be carried out with full coordination from both the Bar and the Judicial Counsel.