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.
Information Literacy in Law: Starting Points for Improving Legal Research Competencies
Abstract Improving information literacy in law translates into developing methods for improving legal research competencies among lawyers, law students and the general public. This paper summarizes four approaches for improving legal research skills of prospective lawyers in U.S. law schools and discusses their successes and shortcomings to help assess their potential application in an international environment. These approaches include: (1) offering mandatory law school courses in legal research; (2) adding elective (or optional) credit based courses in legal research; (3) offering non-credit legal research support to law students at their point of need; and (4) testing prospective lawyers on their legal research competencies as a requirement to being licensed to practice law.
Globalization and the Internationalization of Legal Education in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography
Globalization and its influence on legal education is a topic of growing interest to the legal profession and to legal educators alike. The first articles on the subject appeared in the mid-1990s, and the frequency of publications has been increasing ever since. This bibliography provides annotations to English-language law journal articles published between 1995 and 2008 that focus on the impact of globalization on legal education in the United States.