Lines of flight: Small jurisdictions, small legal educations across the North Atlantic
- Date: Wednesday 25 June 2025, 9:30 – 11:00
- Location: Liberty Building, Boardroom 2.42
- Cost: Free
Join CIRLE for a hybrid seminar on how small jurisdictions in the North Atlantic can offer fresh ideas and insights into legal education by comparing their unique cultures, challenges, and innovation.
Abstract
Jurisdictional size is a key factor in the content, forms, cultures and literatures of legal education in every jurisdiction. But what of smaller and very small jurisdictions, which are often unregarded and forgotten in the research literature? What can they, from their size and location, contribute to contemporary debates around legal education; and what can we learn from small and micro-jurisdictions regarding the place, the potential, the creativity and the futures of legal education? Legal Educations Across the North Atlantic (LENA), is a project that sets out to explore these issues and to work towards the production of an edited book on the subject. It comprises legal educators from Nova Scotia, Greenland, Iceland, Denmark, Faroes, Scotland, N Ireland, Ireland and Wales.
Drawing upon Deleuzian approaches, it aims to:
1. Provide information in the form of a comparative survey of essential aspects of practice and theory in a range of small / very small jurisdictions across the North Atlantic
2. Analyse the debates surrounding present theory and praxis
3. Explore what the futures of legal education hold for each jurisdiction in terms of innovation, diversity, sustainability and indigeneity.
4. View through a comparative lens the place of smaller jurisdictions living in the shadows of larger, and their places in the global legal education habitus.
In this seminar Professor Paul Maharg and Dr Kryss Macleod will explore several aspects of the project’s work to date, namely the relations between culture and history in small jurisdictions and the effects of larger jurisdictions upon them.
About the Speakers
Professor Paul Maharg is Professor of Law at Manchester Metropolitan Law School, a Consultant in Legal Education at Osgoode Hall Law School in Canada, and a Visting Professor at the Faculty of Law, Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a world-leading scholar in legal education, a space in which he has vast, global, experience in innovating (including through the use of technology within teaching, learning and assessment), leading, directing and writing. He has co-founded two book series, Emerging Legal Education and Digital Games, Simulations and Learning; is the author/co-author of seven books; is currently undertaking a further three book projects, including co-authoring Legal Education in the North Atlantic: The Cultures and Practices of Small Jurisdictions; and he has authored or co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed book chapters, journal articles, and professional reports (including for professional bodies).
Dr Kryss Macleod is the School Lead on Education at Manchester Metropolitan Law School. Since 2019, she has also led on the school’s strategy for technology and digitalisation, as well as designing and leading on the implementation of digital skills, lawtech, and law and technology provision across the school.