The University Library: A Driving Force for Reform in Legal Education?†
Abstract Information skills training offers opportunities for gradually embedding changes in legal education programs and to bring about the integration of legal knowledge, skills and experience. If shared goals are formulated in a spirit of close collaboration, curricular changes and revisions will potentially have a greater effect and be more likely to enhance long-term programs. The university library can serve as an ideal base for the use of information technology such as web portals and content integrated search engines, which in turn will help refocus attention on the use of library facilities. The harmonization and maintenance of this apparatus, however, requires both a new form of cooperation and a re-interpretation of the legal education curriculum. This article compares several library developments which could prove important for legal education from a Dutch perspective, and also examines library education in the law schools of the United States of America.
Clinical Legal Education in the Law University: Goals and Challenges
Calls for reform of legal education in India have focused on preparation and relevance. The route to achieving both has consistently been linked to clinical legal education. In 1999, I heard one of the leaders of legal education in India, Dr. Madhava Menon, discuss his goals for clinical legal education in at the first Global Alliance for Justice Education Conference in Trivandrum. I learned at the time that he had been invited to lead a new law school in the country, and he made it clear that clinical legal education would be central to the new law school model that he intended to pursue, a model based on recommendations that grew out of prior assessments of legal education in India. Under this model, law students would be trained to be productive members of a community of lawyers that had refined the skills needed to develop and implement creative  strategies for addressing the pressing demand for social justice in the country. The approach reflected a connection between responsibility for the underserved and goals for clinical legal education in India that dates back to collaboration with academics from the United States in the late 1960’s.
Historias de mi barrio: contemporary art in a community at high risk of social exclusion
Abstract Historias de mi barrio is a piece of pedagogic research aimed at highlighting the way art can articulate the relationship between the educational context and a neighbourhood at high risk of social exclusion. The starting point for this study was to ask whether this type of research, centred around the arts, was suitable in complex contexts and whether it might eventually lead to pedagogic improvement. The results gathered, and indeed the work carried out by the artists and university lecturers involved, together with pupils 6–12 years old and their instructors in a state school, provide evidence of a positive answer – and notably of the necessity of knowing about the socio-economic reality of the student cohort when planning learning projects and of the importance of the arts as a crucial element in education.