Street Law: Opportunities and Challenges Professor Jane Williams, Elenor Marano, and Sa’ad Khalayleh, Swansea University
Street Law offers law students the opportunity to develop their knowledge and skills via interactive and experiential learning. Typically, a Street Law student will simultaneously learn about a topic and prepare to present information on it tailored to the needs of a particular audience. They may work in teams, must manage their own and joint projects, adopt an ethical foundation for their engagement with a client group, be adaptable in delivery, seek feedback, evaluate, reflect and create forward plans considering their experiences. Street Law interfaces with pro bono professional activity, clinical legal education and public legal education. Street Law has increased in popularity in UK law schools both as an extra-curricular activity and as accredited learning. Research (for example Suhaini and Zulkifli, 2012; Draslarovà, 2019, Grimes, 2003) and our own experience (of Street Law at Swansea University) suggest that law students benefit from Street Law’s accommodation of different learning styles, development of professional skills and attributes, and not least, the opportunity it offers for deeper embedding of substantive legal knowledge. The questions posed in this interactive session are whether, and to what extent, pedagogical approaches deployed in Street Law could and/or should be embedded in delivery across Law School curricula. It will be suggested that so doing would contribute towards a robust and positive response to the challenge: ‘What now is the point of law school?’
The session incorporates a short Street Law session designed and delivered by Swansea University law students, followed by a structured discussion and conclusions.
References:
Suhaimi, Asnida Mohd, & Zulkifli, Nur Farzana Mohd. (2012). ‘Street Law Based CLE: Student-Impact-Assessment’, International Journal of Clinical Legal Education, 18, 218-226.
Draslarova, H. (2019) ‘Street Law as a unique learning method: What do students themselves actually find to be its benefits? Answers from the Czech Republic’, International Journal of Public Legal Education 3(1), 123 – 145.
Grimes, R. (2003) ‘Legal literacy, community empowerment and law schools - some lessons from a working model in the UK’ Law Teacher 37(3), 273 - 284
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