Page 5 - Law School of the Future

How to innovate legal studies:
the ideas of a group of young jurists from TIL 2019

Law schools need to innovate in order to keep up with societal and technological evolution.
Some recent publications confirm this need: Cathy N. Davidson (2017) highlights the importance of
innovating legal studies to prepare law students for a world that is rapidly changing; Carel Stolker
(2014) focuses on the need of innovating the methodologies of teaching and doing research activity.
More recently, Alberto Alemanno and Lamin Khadar have suggested performing Legal Clinics on
specific topics, particularly in European Law Schools, where law is traditionally taught with formalistic,
doctrinal, hierarchical and passive methods. Finally, Adam Chilton et al. stress the importance of
specific skills required to law professors.
Something has already started to change in Law Schools with the introduction of new courses and new
methodologies, Moot Courts, seminars on coding and legal clinics.

What do law students and early career lawyers and researchers think about the need of innovating?
This dossier collects the opinions of 27 young legal scholars from Italian and European institutions,
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who took part to the intensive course Technological Innovation and Law (TIL 2019, February 4 - 8 2019)
promoted by the University of Pavia and the European Centre for Law, Science and new Technologies
in collaboration with ELSA and other academic institutions in Pavia, and generously funded by the
Banca del Monte di Pavia.
During the intensive course they worked in groups and identified what needs to be changed in Law
Schools and sketched their idea of the Law School of the future.
The table at the end of the dossier sums up the works of the groups. However, two aspects are worthy
to be underlined immediately. Firstly, the international nature of their suggestions (they belong to a
generation that has a global rather than a national view of law); secondly, the importance given to new
technologies and artificial intelligence. In other words, these young scholars express the need of
studying law in an innovative way, where technologies and international legal experiences play a key role,
rather than studying something different.

This dossier is the means to spread the groups’ ideas among Italian and European young jurists and
Law Schools.

Maria Laura Fiorina (Scientific secretariat TIL 2019)
Francesca Arrigo (Trainee at the Court of Appeal in Milan, MI)
Amedeo Santosuosso (Co-director TIL 2019)

Quoted publications:
• Cathy N. Davidson, The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World In Flux, New York:
Basic Books, 2017.
• Carel Stolker, Rethinking the Law School: Education, Research, Outreach and Governance, Cambridge University Press (2014)
• Alberto Alemanno & Lamin Khadar, Reinventing Legal Education: How Clinical Education Is Reforming the Teaching and Practice
of Law in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2018)
• Chilton, Adam S. and Masur, Jonathan S. and Rozema, Kyle, Rethinking Law School Tenure Standards (January 30, 2019). Available
at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3200005 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3200005 (visited 30 March 2019)