Liam Elphick is an Associate Lecturer at the Monash University Faculty of Law. He has over nine years of experience as a legal educator, primarily in private law subjects including contract, torts, equity and trusts. He also teaches in discrimination law and sports law. Liam is an award-winning teacher at multiple universities, including the university-level University of Western Australia Excellence in Teaching Award and the Monash University Students’ Association Above and Beyond Teaching Award. He has led several large-scale empirical research projects on legal education, particularly focusing on student attendance, engagement and wellbeing. Liam has also conducted various legal education training workshops for sessional teachers and legal skills workshops for students, and sits as the Early Career Academic Representative on the Australasian Law Academics Association Executive Committee.
Legal Essay Writing Workshops: A Worthy Addition to Skills-Based Learning at Law Schools?
Abstract:
Legal essay writing is a skill that must be mastered to succeed in a law degree. Students often struggle with this skill. And legal educators frequently bemoan students’ lack of ability to write legal essays. Yet, despite these problems, many law schools do not provide formal instruction on how to write legal essays – even though students are often provided with formal instruction on legal research and other skills. For those that wish to institute training on legal essay writing, there is little formal evidence of the potential student improvement that may result and there is little indication on the relative time that must be spent to achieve any improvement. This may be one potential reason why more law schools do not provide such instruction. In order to address these issues, we provided a large cohort of undergraduate law students in two first-year law units with the option of attending workshops that provided formal instruction on legal essay writing. To assess student improvement, the students’ essay writing performance in these two units was then compared with their essay writing performance in a unit conducted prior to the essay writing workshops. The results of the assessment, and feedback provided by students, illustrate both the potential improvement that can be gained from such a programme as well as the relative time/effort that is necessary to achieve those gains.