ADRIAN EVANS, Monash University - Faculty of Law
Email: Adrian.Evans@law.monash.edu.au
ROSS L HYAMS, Monash University - Faculty of Law
Email: ross.hyams@law.monah.edu.au

While some major Australian law schools remain in what can only be described as clinical oblivion, 20 of our 29 law schools describe themselves as having clinical programs of one variety or another. This number signifies that the majority of Australian law deans now believe that some sort of clinical program is important to the educational and even social objectives of their schools. At its heart, it is argued, clinical legal education is simply the best way to teach normative law and the skills of normative analysis and to instill the sense of professionalism in students which a sceptical client community increasingly considers essential in its lawyers. But nothing is taken for granted in education, and clinical programs must periodically evaluate their performance in the same way as other programs, particularly when the prize could be greater overall engagement from the new federal government in innovative tertiary legal education. Periodic reviews by law schools of all aspects of their legal education mix are a reality, and their cyclical re-occurrence provides ongoing opportunity to improve the integration of conventional and clinical law teaching. Clinical educators need to be prepared for the cyclical review process, not because reviews can help to sustain their program but because such reviews provide opportunities to entrench the sustainability of legal education itself. This article is about the need for clinicians to be effectively prepared for independent, external reviews of law school clinical programs. It identifies what a clinical review should examine and what process is best adopted by such an evaluation in an Australian legal education setting, in order to maximize the prospects for workable and integrated clinical-legal education.

KATH HALL, Australian National University
Email: Kath.Hall@anu.edu.au

Recent research in Australia has suggested that law students are four times more likely than students in other degrees to suffer from anxiety and depression. The Brain and Mind Research Institute’s (BMRI) 2008 survey of lawyers and law students found that over 35% of the law students studied suffered from high to very high levels of psychological distress, and that almost 40% reported distress severe enough to warrant clinical or medical intervention. This contrasted with just over 17% of medical students and 13% of the general population. Similarly, a significant portion of the lawyers surveyed were found to suffer from elevated levels of anxiety and depression, with 31% falling in the high to very high levels of psychological distress.

With research on student well-being now becoming available in Australia, this article takes up the point of how Australian law schools will respond to these findings. It suggests that even before we start to consider the question of what we should do about the problem of student well-being, we must recognize that there are common psychological processes which can undermine our response to these issues. In particular, research in cognitive dissonance and rationalization suggest that even as we become aware of negative information on law student distress, we can unconsciously ignore it or rationalize it away on the basis that it is not relevant to us. Furthermore, these same cognitive processes can affect our students, such that they can fail to appreciate the significant implications of this research for them.

CARRIE MENKEL-MEADOW, Georgetown University Law Center, University of California, Irvine Law School
Email: MEADOW@LAW.GEORGETOWN.EDU

The essay reviews the content of twenty-five years of the Harvard Program on Negotiation's Negotiation Journal, identifying themes and issues explored on its pages in the past, the current issues challenging the field’s scholars and practitioners, and the issues likely to confront us in the future. It argues that while we in the field hoped for simple, elegant, and universal theories of negotiation and conflict resolution, the last twenty-five years have demonstrated the increasing complexification of negotiation theory and practice, from increased numbers of parties and issues, and dilemmas of intertemporal commitments, ethics, accountability, and relationships of private action to public responsibility

NORMAN OTTO STOCKMEYER, Thomas M. Cooley Law School
Email: stockmen@cooley.edu

The Carnegie report, Educating Lawyers, emphasises the importance of feedback. Best Practices endorses multiple-choice testing as a highly reliable way to evaluate factual knowledge and problem-solving skills. This paper describes how frequent multiple-choice quizzes can help students and teachers alike assess progress and enhance success in the crucial first semester of law school.