Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemFrom court to college: the institutionalisation of judicial education during its first decade in Victoria, 2005–2015( 2018)The direction of movement in legal education generally has been away from the apprenticeship model and informal, practice-based learning. The jury, case-based reasoning with room for judicial discretion, and the apprenticeship system have been three great strengths of the common law system. But judicial discretion in general has been steadily reduced by legislation, and control of judicial discretion in sentencing was strongly linked to the perceived need for judicial education. And while the virtues of apprenticeship and mentoring are being rediscovered in academia, both law and legal education have become increasingly standardised and institutionalized. Opportunities for informal, observational and supervised learning, the cornerstones of the apprenticeship model, are correspondingly diminished. The change began with the profession’s handing over of its gatekeeper role to universities (degrees in place of articles), and continued in the transition from voluntary to mandatory continuing education in the profession in 2004, with quantitative measures, record-keeping and attendance requirements, and domination of the process by the Law Institute and the Leo Cussen Institute, the chief providers of continuing legal education. Pre-admission Articles gave way to practical training courses, which then became graduate diplomas in legal practice. Bar mentorship at first included, then became increasingly reliant on, a formal Bar Readers’ course and increasingly complex Reading Regulations, and finally a Bar entrance exam. The impetus towards formalised education continued with the introduction of programmed education for judges, again with a published curriculum and quantitative attendance benchmarks for ‘education’ that is in reality ‘training’ on a corporate model consisting largely of programmed events. This case study covers the first decade of judicial education in Victoria. It focuses on judicial education for Supreme Court judges in the context of the broader field of legal education, tracing its progress between 2005 and 2015. A snapshot of the situation not long after its introduction is provided by original research data gathered in 2008, when members of the Bar were relatively unaware of the program for judges and the offerings were meagre. The evolution of judicial education since that point provides additional background and foundation for research which should now be undertaken: assessment of judicial education the curriculum and the program of judicial education after ten years.