Research Seminar 1 July 2020

Simon Kozlina: Critical Pedagogy and Legal Education – explorations of theory and practice in Law and Public Policy

The aim of this article is to examine some of the philosophical underpinnings and influences of a subject I teach, ‘Law and Public Policy’ that I was blissfully or ignorantly unaware of when I first designed the subject. The purpose of the article is to understand and develop the implications that arise for legal education more generally from this reflection and reflexion. The article describes key elements of the subject, Law and Public Policy, provides an outline of critical pedagogy, then discusses the limited extent to which critical pedagogy has featured in the scholarship of legal education. Following those overviews, the articles examines three (?) specific implications that come from a consideration of the subject’s elements in light of critical pedagogy in the context of legal education. My expectation is that the article provides both a useful review of the interactions between legal education and critical pedagogy (which is limited in general and very limited in the Australian context) and a ‘real world’ and ‘practical’ example of the operation of critical pedagogy in a classroom.