Asian Journal of Legal Education

The aim of this article is to use a community needs assessment to teach law students knowledge, skills and values while identifying the areas of greatest need for access to justice services in the community. To begin, the international team of US and Myanmar law faculty and students researched literature on the country of Myanmar and various issues facing Myanmar’s citizens and its legal education system. We also had a team from Missouri Western State University on the ground in Myanmar working with the international non-governmental organization (NGO) BABSEACLE (formerly, Bridges Across Borders South East Asia Clinical Legal Education) to work with faculty and students at the Department of Law, Taunggyi. The team conducted a community needs assessment (CNA) on legal needs in Taunggyi, Myanmar, to better understand community teaching needs. BABSEACLE provides law schools with the tools and opportunities to expand clinical legal education (CLE). The team in Myanmar from Missouri Western State University consisted of Professor David Tushaus and two undergraduate students, Britane Hubbard and Kaylee Sharp, who had the opportunity to teach CLE in English to law students at Taunggyi University. Professor Tushaus served as an international clinician in residence (ICIR). BABSEACLE, operating in Myanmar since 2013, has successfully used ICIRs to introduce and strengthen CLE, by embedding experienced law professors and practitioners at local universities to serve as mentors to neophyte clinical faculty.⁵

This is a descriptive article concerning a pedagogical intervention and philosophical activity carried out in a Law School in Brazil. The activity described has the pedagogical goal of stimulating the critical and comprehensive approach to law on students. The article presents the philosophical foundations and the ethnographic guidance necessary to develop the activity. The analysis of the results was done considering and interpreting student’s written and oral feedback. Results are shown in a positive light since the activity described is understood as a tool to facilitate and improve the awareness of the law students by making them reflect about the concrete practices, symbols and interactions in the professional field.

Teaching law in Europe and many other parts of the world is primarily and traditionally conducted in an ex-cathedra style of transferring knowledge. The emergence of law clinics and their integration into the law schools and the general curriculum of law students pose the constant question of what specifically defines a law clinic in contrast to other programmes. The authors therefore set out to answer the question of what is essential for a programme to call itself a law clinic as they deem it important for the further development of specific concepts and on a more general note for the general acceptance and movement of law clinics. For this, the article investigates the history of law clinics and the initial motivation of providing social justice as the reason of their formation. With that in mind and their basic understanding of a clinic as an institution that helps clients with specific problems, the authors take the position that a “law clinic” must render legal aid to people in need and therefore work with life-client cases. As the possibility of working on live-client cases with law students is thus defined a prerequisite of operating a law clinic, this must be checked for feasibility. In the following, the article compares different European national legal regimes on rendering legal aid and concludes that the proposed work with live-client cases isn’t only desirable but also viable.

As a matter of tradition and necessity, teachers of constitutional law within Nigeria (and elsewhere) are often compelled to refer to case law to provide illustrations of principles of constitutional law as enshrined in the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended). However, in some instances, where the said constitution does not provide explicit provisions, teachers of constitutional law are compelled to cite foreign case law as persuasive precedents. Still there are instances wherein there are neither foreign case law nor indigenous case law as precedents. In such situations, teachers of constitutional law are compelled to examine existing case law and relevant legislation until there is a pronouncement from either the Supreme Court or an alteration of the constitution by the National Assembly.

One such situation is the subject of the analysis in this article: the situation whereby a president provides assent to bills after the expiration of the tenure of the National Assembly. As legislative tradition, the last session of each Chambers of the Nigeria’s National Assembly culminating each legislative term is usually a valedictory Session. Accordingly, Thursday, 6 June 2019 witnessed the last Session of the eighth National Assembly. As the president transmitted a Proclamation letter terminating the term of the eighth National Assembly inaugurated on 9 June 2015, it becomes paramount to examine the legal and constitutional implications of bills passed by the eighth National Assembly between 2016 and 2018 and up to 5 June 2019, which were assented to by the president after the tenure of the Assembly and office of the president. Thus, this article examines the constitutionality or otherwise of assenting to bills passed by the National Assembly and assented to by the president after the expiration of tenure of their offices. The article argues that the provisions of the 1999 Constitution had been violated when the president signed into law bills passed by the eighth National Assembly after the tenure of office of the president and the eighth National Assembly. It concludes that bills rejected by the president will require another legislative process of being passed into law again by the same Assembly or subsequent one before it can be assented to by the president. Failure to follow this constitutional process will render the assent unconstitutional.

Clinical legal education (CLE) is an increasingly common feature of legal education programmes in higher education around the world. The growth in this area has led to a developing academic literature facilitated by specialist journals and conferences, which have produced a largely pragmatic and practice-orientated discourse, with relatively little discussion of wider theoretical issues and their relevance to this area of academic practice. This conceptual study contextualizes the growth of CLE in the UK by considering the influence of two neoliberal policy drivers: marketization and the decline in publicly funded legal advice and representation. It proceeds to consider how these policies have helped to shape the practice-oriented focus of the literature on this area before making an argument that giving more explicit focus to theoretical issues has the potential to enrich the growing body of CLE literature.

This article studies the burgeoning legal clinics in Afghanistan and describes the complexity that influences their effectiveness and accessibility. This complexity arises from conflicts among statutory law, Sharia and customary laws, exacerbated by the dual legal education in law and Sharia faculties in the highly challenging environment of the country. The main objective of this qualitative research is to illustrate these challenges faced by pro bono legal aid and legal clinics, and its main claim is that unsettled conflicts between statutory law, Sharia and customs and between legal education systems negatively affect legal aid provision in the country. Legal education, provided by faculties of law and Sharia to suit the aims of the two recognized legal systems of statutory law and Sharia, is considered the internal challenge to the clinical legal service, and the highly adverse environment in which legal clinics operate is considered the external challenge. Since some of the external challenges are related to traditional dispute resolution mechanisms, they are inevitably related to legal and legal education systems, and hence, addressing them improves the effectiveness of the legal clinics. This research uses available data to support its claims. As part of a sustainable solution to the acute shortage of legal aid throughout Afghanistan, legal education should emphasize practical aspects of law, improve curricular development in both law and Sharia faculties, train more female lawyers, use more broadly accepted frameworks of human rights and social justice and highlight the values of voluntarism.

This article looks at how we design and deliver legal education, why we do so in the ways that we do and whether there may be more effective ways of doing so. So far as the latter is concerned a range of models are set out that provide a template for more interactive and inclusive ways of learning and teaching.

The emphasis throughout this contribution is on the need for a theoretical framework based on educational ‘best practice’ and the importance of locating what we do and how we do it in the context of the contemporary law school.

The article argues that careful consideration must be given to not only the need for and significance of change but also the logistical and other concerns in implementing and delivering this, including the coverage of the curriculum and the assessment of student work.

The conclusions reached suggest that a reasoned and structured road map addressing, critically but constructively, the need for further developing our understanding and practice of pedagogy for lawyers may help to produce a legal education system, nationally and internationally, that is better fit for present and future times.

The University of Pennsylvania Law School has had a long relationship with Chinese students; indeed, it was among the pioneers in the admission of Chinese students in America. To better understand the origin of this affiliation, this article traces the relationship between the celebrated Chinese diplomat Wu Ting-Fang and the then Dean William Draper Lewis, exploring the pivotal role this relationship played in forging the law school’s Chinese ties. The association was cemented when Penn Law School welcomed its first Chinese undergraduate student in 1906 and graduate student in 1908. The lesser known details of these two pioneering Chinese law students’ backgrounds, academic pursuits at Penn Law School and their key achievements upon graduation are revealed in this article as well. Against a backdrop of racial prejudice and the legal subordination of Asian peoples in a new American empire, the personal efforts of men such as Dean Lewis were critical in the admission of the first cohort of Chinese law students to American law schools in the early part of the twentieth century.

What do the different State organs do when they face a crisis? Do the suffering institutions successfully re-invent themselves or is it that some other institution uses the crisis to find an ‘opportunity’ to re-invent itself? Can one’s crisis be another’s opportunity?

This case-study analyses how the Supreme Court of India (hereinafter SCI) reinvented itself in a bid to further the cause of good governance in the country ever since emergency had been clamped on the nation towards the end of 1970s. Surely there has been a crisis of governance in India, caused by the pathetic performance of both the legislature and the executive. It has led to myriad problems in both social and political arenas. If left unaddressed, Indian people might have turned more violent than they already are and that could have perpetrated a failure of democracy in the country. But the SCI has successfully played a positive role in this regard. If the other institutions have failed the people, the Supreme Court has championed their cause. The world’s largest democracy stands saved until now.

But is it wholly the judges’ heartfelt concern for the people that has prompted the Supreme Court to function in this fashion? Did anything go wrong during the emergency? Why is it that it has been more and more active ever since the emergency ended? And why is it that there has been an exponential growth in public interest litigations (hereinafter PILs) in the Supreme Court even though it cannot handle so many cases because of infrastructural paucities?

Situating itself in the specific context of PILs entertained by the SCI and supporting it with the theoretical inputs of the so-called ‘principal-agent framework’, this essay argues that there has been a competition (i.e., between the court and the elected politicians) for ‘occupying’ more space in the domain of governance since the inception of the Constitution and it is only the Supreme Court that got the right ‘opportunity’ to achieve its objective in the wake of crisis in governance that became so visible in Indian politics ever since the fag-end of the 1970s.

While the court tried other instruments earlier in its game plan vis-a-vis the elected politicians, the crisis situation since the end of the 1970s made it ‘invent’ a new tool in the form of PILs capable of safeguarding the interests of the people and insulating them against the mindless functioning of multiple state agencies.

But how far can the SCI (hereinafter SCI) proceed with this new tool? Is there a risk of ‘overusing’ it? Does the court not have its own limitations in this regard, too? What should the Supreme Court do in order to avert a fresh ‘crisis’?

Norm Contestation: Insights into Non-conformity with Armed Conflict Norms, Betcy Jose, Electronic edition, Springer, Switzerland, 2018–2019. pp. 112 (Paperback), ₹4,116.00/$ 54.55 (Kindle Edition).