International Review of Law, Computers & Technology

DIGITAL LEARNING | LEGAL EDUCATION

The World Wide Web is an increasingly important medium for teaching and learning.
New methods of course design are being used widely to exploit it. The range of
technologies we can use is rich and changing fast, with portable PCs, the advent of
wireless technology, and increasing use of PDAs. Web applications themselves are
increasingly blurring the distinctions between hypermedia, multimedia and the
web. All this is affecting pedagogy: the convergence of online and face-to-face
teaching methods, for example, is creating new learning situations for our students,
with fresh challenges and opportunities for both students and staff. It is all the
more important, therefore, to discover and consolidate what we know works best
for legal learning, to learn from others’ use of web applications, and to consider
which pedagogical designs are most effective for particular teaching and learning
situations.

In 2001 the above paragraph began the call for papers to a special issue of the IRLCT on
web-based teaching and learning. 25 years later, this current special issue call appears at
a critical moment in digital development in legal education. It is a Janus point, a hinge
moment in the history of communications technology, and in two ways. First, and like the
first great shift in modern communications in modern period, that of moveable type, it
introduces technologies the effects of which we cannot in any way predict. The first 50
years of the shift from manuscript to moveable print technologies, c.1455-1500, is known
as the incunabula or cradle period in the north and west of Europe. During that time it is
estimated that over 20 million books were published in Europe – publications that slowly
and over decades transformed production and dissemination across many fields of
knowledge. But in our own time, digital has in half that time had an almost immeasurable
impact on human society globally. AI model parameters now outnumber extant printed
volumes by orders of magnitude. Cyberculture, the impact of digital media, the internet’s
impact on every form of industry and production, the spawn of commerce and
communications over the web – for those of us living here and now, this has been a
dominant motif of our lives. With the exception of climate change, no other aspect of our
Anthropocene environment has had such immense impact on our lives and the lives of
future generations.

Second, we are at a transformation point where GenAI, the latest digital advance, can,
according to the UN, support sustainable development goals. But it also threatens privacy,
erodes security, consumes vast quantities of data, utilities and much else, and fuels societal inequalities. Human rights and human agency both are in the balance. Amidst
the constant churn of AI engines, in legal education the theory and use of GenAI is still a
matter of serious and unresolved debate. Few standards have evolved, practices diverge
wildly, and the relationship of experimental lab to practice/discursive fields is highly
problematic.

This special issue will focus on how digital is changing legal education at a fundamental or
meta-level. As editors, we call upon the journal’s academic communities to contribute to
understanding the transformation of legal education. We are looking for innovative
theoretical frameworks that explore and explain the complexities of contemporary legal
pedagogy; for practice-based studies that demonstrate theory in action through concrete
designs or interventions; and for historical perspectives that help us to understand our
present moment and its future shadow.

Potential contributors may want to consider the following issues relevant to this general
topic:

1. Disciplinary applications: using digital in teaching and learning specific subjects in
the curriculum
2. Curriculum architectures and design: effects of digital on the future of curriculum
design
3. Professional lives and formation: effects of digital in education on academic and
professional lives
4. Digital learning and cognition: digital cultures, digital pedagogical designs, forms of
collaborative learning in digital environments, effects of digital on cognitive
capacities
5. Institutional reconfiguration: the places of new partnerships, collaborations, social
compacts; the break-up of institutions, erasures of practices, the erosions of social
culture, employment structures and labour conditions
6. Governance, ownership & datafication: platform and vendor governance,
surveillance, monetisation and predictive analytics in learning platforms,
comparative regulatory responses and their implications for legal education
providers
7. Equity, inclusion & accessibility: examining how digital infrastructures can mitigate
or exacerbate inequities linked to socio-economic status, disability, language or
geography, and proposals of regulatory or design solutions
8. Environmental & sustainability dimensions: carbon, energy and resource footprints
of digital legal-education ecosystems and explorations of policy or design
mitigations
9. Retrospectives and future horizons: how we may understand the recent quarter
century of digital development in legal education and lessons for the next 25 year