A TALE OF TWO SECTORS: DYNAMIC CURRICULUM CHANGE FOR A DYNAMICALLY CHANGING PROFESSION

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed dynamic change in the working environment of 21st century lawyers. While the practice of law has changed radically, it is not clear that legal education reform has kept pace with the demands of modern practice. In an environment where the tertiary sector has also been transformed by external drivers beyond its control, the QUT Law Faculty has undertaken a major reconceptualisation of its undergraduate law programs. Encouraged by the Australian Law Reform Commission’s 2000 exhortation to re-orientate legal education around “what lawyers need to be able to do‿, rather than remaining bound to the traditional focus of “what lawyers need to know‿, the Faculty embarked on curriculum renewal centred around the development and implementation of a graduate capability framework. The Faculty wished not only to address the generic issues of first year transition, it was also committed to providing a package of teaching and learning opportunities that combined substantive content, theoretical and practical knowledge with the development of certain generic (and some discipline specific) skills; all of this in a legal context to a basic level of competency for all students, regardless of the diversity of their prior background and experience. This paper will describe this particular pedagogical response to meeting the needs of the 21st century legal practitioner.