2020 Professional Legal Education Conference Recordings Now Available

Professor Nick James

On 1-3 October 2020, the Centre for Professional Legal Education proudly hosted the very first Professional Legal Education conference. The plenary presentations and individual Livestream presentations were delivered entirely online and watched live by an audience of 200+ attendees from across Australia and around the world. The goal of the conference was to take steps toward harmonising legal education by bringing together law teachers, legal scholars, legal practitioners, law societies, regulators, and others to engage in discussions about how law is taught in Australia and elsewhere, and in that regard the conference was a success. All of the feedback we have received has been extremely positive, and we are delighted by the level of collegial engagement with the conference from across both the academy and the profession in Australia and internationally.

We are very pleased to announce that recordings of the plenary presentations and most of the individual Livestream presentations are now freely available via the CPLE website.

Whether or not you were able to attend the Conference, you can now access recordings of a wide array of accomplished legal educators, experienced legal practitioners and esteemed legal scholars speaking on a variety of engaging topics.

Highlights include:

• The Plenary Lecture by Dr Colin James on ‘Trauma, Stigma and Compassionate Engagement: The Need for Reform in Legal Education, Training and Practice’
• The Plenary Debate about the topic ‘‘You had one job!’: Law schools are failing at preparing graduates for practice’ with Luke Murphy (President, QLS), Ann-Maree David (Executive Director, College of Law) and Matthew Roach (Director, Parampara) for the affirmative and Assistant Professor Tanya Atwill (Director, Bond GDLP Program), Professor Sally Kift (President, Australian Learning and Teaching Fellows) and Michael Lavarch (former Dean of Law, QUT) for the negative.
• The Plenary Panel discussion of the topic ‘Is legal education in Australia over-regulated or under-regulated?’ by Emeritus Professor Sandford Clark (Former Chair, LACC),    Professor Lesley Hitchens (Chair, CALD), Professor Alex Steel (Director Teaching Strategy, UNSW), Associate Professor Kate Galloway (Editor-in-Chief, Legal Education Review) and Professor Caroline Strevens (Academy Chair, Association of Law Teachers (UK))
• The Plenary Public lecture by Dr Rajesh K Reddy on ‘The Rise of Animal Law Education: A Discipline Whose Time Is Now’.

You can also access 40 individual presentations on:

• Being a Law Teacher
• Inclusion, Feelings and Hope
• Law and Art
• Mentoring
• Past, Present and Future
• Teaching in the Digital Era
• Teaching New Law Students
• Teaching Professionalism
• Teaching Responsibility
• Teaching Skills
• The Big Picture
• Wellbeing

We encourage you to take the time to visit the CPLE website and take a look at what is available.

The success of the Conference would not have been possible without the support of our partners (the Bond University Faculty of Law, Voiceless, the Law Wellness Network, and the Australasian Law Academic Association (ALAA)), the chairs, the attendees, our colleagues, and the presenters, and for that we are extremely grateful. We are also grateful for the support of our IT partner Encore Event Technologies who provided such an innovative and engaging online conference environment.

The second Professional Legal Education Conference will take place at Bond University in 2022. We look forward to seeing you then.

Professor Nick James and Professor Rachael Field

CPLE Directors