Affect and Legal Education: Emotion in Learning and Teaching the Law

The place of emotion in legal education is rarely discussed or analysed, and we do not have to seek far for the reasons. The difficulty of interdisciplinary research, the technicisation of legal education itself, the view that affect is irrational and antithetical to core western ideals of rationality - all this has made the subject of emotion in legal education invisible. Yet the educational literature on emotion proves how essential it is to student learning and to the professional lives of teachers. This text, the first full-length book study of the subject, seeks to make emotion a central topic of research for legal educators, and restore the power of emotion in our teaching and learning. Part 1 focuses on the contribution that neuroscience can make to legal learning, a theme that is carried through other chapters in the book. Part 2 explores the role of emotion in the working lives of academics and clinical staff, while Part 3 analyses the ways in which emotion can be used in learning and teaching. The book, interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in its reference, breaks new ground in its analysis of the educational lifeworld of situations, communities, actors and interactions in legal education.

Paul Maharg is Professor of Law at the Australian National University, and Professor of Law at Nottingham Law School. He has published extensively in the areas of legal education and legal critique. He has worked with regulators, law firms and law schools in England, Scotland, Canada, USA, Hong Kong and Australia. Caroline Maughan is a Principal Lecturer in Law and Director of Teaching and Learning at Bristol Law School, University of the West of England. She specializes in skills-based legal education. She currently teaches on the Bar Vocational Course and LLB year 3. She is a co-author of the OUP LPC manual 'Lawyers' Skills'. Her research interests are centred around legal education. She has published widely on skills-based, experiential and collaborative learning, and with Julian Webb co-edited Teaching Lawyers' Skills (1996) and co-wrote the student text Lawyering Skills and the Legal Process, (CUP Law in Context series, 2nd ed 2005). She has facilitated a number of workshops at conferences and staff development events across the UK.