Nigel Duncan is Professor Emeritus of Legal Education at City Law School, City, University of London. He is a Convenor of the Legal Ethics Forum of the School’s Centre for the Study of Legal Professional Practice. In July 2014 he hosted the 6th International Legal Ethics Conference. He is a founder member of the UK Clinical Legal Education Organisation and of the Global Alliance for Justice Education, and founder with Clark Cunningham of the International Forum on Teaching Legal Ethics and Professionalism, a website designed as an interactive resource and forum for those interested in the education and training of legal professionals – www.teachinglegalethics.org. He is convenor of Teaching Legal Ethics UK, a community of practice including members from many different law schools and some practitioners, which holds regular workshops. He became a National Teaching Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2004 and a Principal Fellow in 2015. He has been a member of the Education & Training Committee of the Bar Standards Board, Advisory Counsel to the Academic and Professional Development Committee of the International Bar Association and a Director of the International Association of Legal Ethics. He is consultant editor of the Law Teacher, the European Journal of Legal Education, and on the editorial advisory boards of the Legal Education Review and the International Journal of the Legal Profession. His research has recently focused on the preparation of ethical professional lawyers facing the problems of corruption, with a book for Routledge currently in preparation. He is currently working on issues of wellbeing in law students, teachers and practitioners. He publishes regularly in the fields of legal education and legal ethics.
Resilience, Wellbeing and Preparation for Professional Practice
Abstract:
Legal practice is a demanding career and it is right that preparation for it should also be demanding. However, a large body of international scholarship has now established that levels of psychological distress are unacceptably high in the legal profession and at law school. This paper argues that an ethical imperative exists to address this issue and to implement strategies that will support lawyer and law student well-being. The critical nature of this work is made even more important as a result of pressures and challenges arising from the neo-liberal nature of contemporary society, and its impact on legal professional practice and legal educational environments globally. The ethical conceptual framework developed in this paper is based on the principle that legal education should do no harm but rather support well-being and a positive professional identity for lawyers. It is based on a theoretical framework drawn from a theory of positive psychology: self-determination theory.
The paper will draw on the presenter’s experience of working with students in both classroom and live clinical settings with particular reference to initiatives taken to help students to maintain and develop the well-being necessary to thrive.