Legal Education & the Human Lawyer
June 27, 2025
9:30am - 3:00pm ET
online
Themes
In a world of rapidly developing artificial intelligence, the theme for this research symposium will be legal education and the human lawyer. Participants will engage with the twin questions, what is unique and important about human legal expertise, and how should legal education support students in developing these capacities? This event will provide a forum for these early-stage discussions and, hopefully, provide a foundation for continued study, reflection, and active experimentation in legal education, including informing decisions about how and why to engage students in using generative AI tools. The symposium will offer three provisional sub-themes:
Human lawyers will continue to be needed to make sense of the complex legal problems faced by individuals, organizations, and society, and to exercise judgement in creating strategies or solutions for these problems. In other words, human sense-making will be crucial in both framing complex problems and in working to resolve them. As Schön argues in the context of another profession, where “[p]roblems are interconnected, environments are turbulent, and the future is indeterminate … [w]hat is called for … is not only … analytic techniques … but the active, synthetic skill of ‘designing a desirable future and inventing ways of bringing it about.’”
Human lawyers will continue to be essential in bringing human values to bear in the use of law to structure human relationships at the level of individuals, communities, and society. Part of the work of lawyers has always been to exercise ethical judgement in selecting from a range of possible solutions to legal problems. This will be even more crucial in working with technology, including investigating the values embedded in technological tools and whose values are privileged or excluded.
Legal work is much more than simply providing legal information and solving technical legal problems. Particularly in working with individual clients, but also in serving organizations and communities, good lawyers are adept at connecting with others to support, counsel, guide, and create. As Gowder explains, the non-cognitive aspects of legal work are particularly critical for those who are already disadvantaged. However, this aspect of human legal expertise will continue to be important to a wide range of people, organizations, and communities that seek the help of lawyers. As Furlong argues, people will continue to come to human lawyers for their “insight, counsel, and honesty,” asking: “What do you think I should do?” “What does the best course of action seem like?” “Will you help me navigate that course?” “Will you speak to others for me?” “Will you deal with others on my behalf?” “Will you accompany me on my journey?”
Speakers
Avni Bahri
Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University, India
With over a decade immersed in social and criminal justice, Avni brings a fervent commitment to advancing human rights, equity, and women's empowerment. Her career is underpinned by a wealth of empirical and on-the-ground research conducted throughout her education and professional journey, enriching her initiatives with a deep and nuanced understanding of the issues at hand. Avni's extensive experience includes significant contributions to policymaking, research, and advocacy, shaped by her work with prominent NGOs and government bodies such as the National Commission for Women and the Ministry of Home Affairs. She has also lent her voice to several public events, including a TEDx talk on women in institutional and custodial settings in India. Avni’s teaching and research focus on the intersections of gender, human rights law, and criminal justice, with a particular interest in how socio-economic realities influence access to and the administration of justice.
Gillian Calder
University of Victoria, Faculty of Law, Canada
Gillian Calder is a Professor, and former Associate Dean, at the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Law where she has been teaching Constitutional Law, Family Law and related seminars from feminist, queer and anti-colonialist perspectives since July 2004. Gillian’s research has focused on questions of legal imagination, theories of constitutional law, law's impact on our understanding of the family and family formation, performativity and storytelling. In particular, she is keenly interested in critical legal pedagogy and the role creativity, ethical imagination and empathy should play in a legal education. Her recent work has focused on law and emotion, where she is weaving connections between teaching, embodiment and social location.
José Ghirardi
FGV Sao Paulo Law School,
Brazil
José Garcez Ghirardi, PhD, is an Associate Professor at FGV Direito SP Law School in Brazil. He conducted postdoctoral work at the Collège de France. He was a visiting scholar at Wayne State University (MI/USA) and Adjunct Faculty at Gonzaga Law School (WA/USA). His current research focuses on Legal Education, Inequality and Democracy. Recent publications include Legal Teaching and the Reconceptualizing of the State: Global Law and New Legal Education Loci in BARTIE, Susan and SANDORMIESKY, David. American Legal Education Abroad: Critical Histories, NY: NYU Press, 2021; Contrepoint sémantique: des réseaux aux nuages” in: Mireille Delmas-Marty; Kathia Martin-Chenut; Camila Perruso. (Org.). Sur les chemins d'un jus commune universalisable. 1ed.Paris: Mare & Martin, 2021; The Brazilian Legal Profession in the Age of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018 (coauthored with GROSS,L. et al); “The unstoppable force, the immovable object: challenges for structuring a cosmopolitan legal education in Brazil”. UCI Irvine Journal of International, Transnational and Comparative Law. , v.3, 2018 (coauthored with VIEIRA, O.V.). Full CV is available at http://lattes.cnpq.br/2258433269720331
Rhea Roy Mammen
Leiden University,
Netherlands
Dr. Rhea Roy Mammen is a lecturer at the Van Vollenhoven Institute, Leiden University (The Netherlands), where she teaches qualitative research methodology and leads the project "Law Schools’ Response to Climate Justice," implemented in both India and the Netherlands. Previously, she was a Senior Assistant Professor at Ramaiah College of Law, Bengaluru. A Gold Medalist, she holds an LL.M. and PhD from NLSIU, Bengaluru, with her doctoral research focusing on experiential legal education using empirical methods. She has been an Indo-Canadian Shastri Fellow, a Linnaeus Palme Fellow to Sweden, and is a Harvard Certified Trainer in Higher Education Learning. Her international project experience includes work with UNDP, the Government of India, and the National Commission for Women. Her expertise spans human rights, environmental law, and legal education, with a strong focus on interdisciplinary approaches and Global North–South collaboration. She co-founded Jusfocus Research Institute, connecting India and the Netherlands through sustainability research and cross-border training. Dr. Mammen has authored three books on legal research methodology and interdisciplinary legal education and serves as an editor and reviewer for multiple academic publications.
Laura Bee
University of Leicester,
United Kingdom
Laura Bee is an Associate Professor, Director of the Legal Advice Clinic at the University of Leicester, and qualified solicitor. Inclusive teaching practices are at the heart of Laura’s Clinic’s work. By providing opportunities for students to improve the world around them in a way that is meaningful to them, the Clinic ‘centres’ its students, enabling them to understand where they may fit into the legal profession, or the wider world. A key aim of the Clinic is to nurture Clinic students’ sense of responsibility, and an understanding of the importance of supporting others to access justice.
Jennifer Chapman
University of Virginia School of
Law, United States
Jennifer E. Chapman is the foreign, comparative and international law librarian at the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Law. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of International and Comparative Law, Fordham Law Review, Denver Law Review and the Journal of the Legal Writing Institute, and in the library and information science texts Antiracist Library and Information Science: Racial Justice and Community and The Role of Citation in the Law. Prior to joining UVA Law, she was the research and faculty services librarian at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. Chapman earned her J.D. from the University of Maryland Carey School of Law in 2017, where she was editor-in-chief of the Maryland Journal of International Law. She earned her M.L.I.S. from the University of Maryland and her B.A. in art history from James Madison University. Before attending law school, she served as collections and exhibitions manager and assistant curator for the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts.
Emma Jones
University of Sheffield,
United Kingdom
Dr Emma Jones is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research focuses on the role of emotions and wellbeing in legal education and the legal profession. She is an International Bar Association Wellbeing Commissioner and General Editor of The Law Teacher journal.
Gemma Smyth
University of Windsor Faculty of
Law, Canada
Professor Gemma Smyth (she/her) is Associate Professor and Externship Director at the Faculty of Law, University of Windsor, on the territories of the Three Fires Confederacy. She manages and teaches in the Judicial Internship Program and at Windsor Law. She is also the Academic Clinic Director for the Class Action Clinic. Professor Smyth has spent her career researching, teaching, and working with clinical and experiential learning programs. She is the author of various articles, reports, and books, including an online, open-source book, "Learning in Place: A Living Landscape of Practice", now in its third edition.
Sarah Buhler
University of Saskatchewan
College of Law, Canada
Sarah Buhler joined the University of Saskatchewan College of Law’s faculty in 2010. Prior to that, she practised law in a Saskatoon firm, taught as a sessional lecturer at the College of Law, and served as the Executive Director and Supervising Lawyer at Community Legal Assistance Services for Saskatoon Inner City (CLASSIC). Sarah researches and teaches in the areas of clinical legal education, legal ethics, and housing and the law. Sarah and her husband Charlie have three children, Simon, Ben, and Rachel.
Audrey Fried
Osgoode Hall Law School,
York University, Canada
Audrey Fried is the Director, Faculty & Curriculum Development at Osgoode Professional Development, Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Canada. Her research focuses on how social and technological developments are changing the legal profession and how legal education should respond. Her scholarship has appeared in the The Law Teacher, the Journal of Legal Education, and in the edited collections, Law Teaching Strategies for a New Era, and Wellbeing and Transitions in Law: Legal Education and the Legal Profession. Her paper, “Unstructuing for Insight: The Legal Profession in an Age of AI & Social Change,” published in The Law Teacher, won the Canadian Association of Law Teachers Prize for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning in 2024. Fried earned her JD from the University of Chicago Law School, her LLM from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and her MA from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto where she is currently a doctoral candidate.
Michele Leering
Queens University Faculty of Law,
Canada
I am a Visiting Scholar at Queen’s University Faculty of Law, and former lawyer and Executive Director of a community-based legal clinic. My research on integrative reflective practice culminated in a 2023 dissertation, having interviewed 53 law professors who are thought leaders in Canada and Australia, and synthesized UK/USA legal education literature. I explored how other disciplines including medicine and teaching implement it. The discipline of reflective practice is integrally related to professionalism, transforming legal education; supporting EDI; and people-centred justice. I have published on introducing in law school, how it supports access to justice, and perils/pitfalls to avoid when introducing it. My passion for encouraging a more robust professional competency framework arose from my struggles as a lawyer committed to social justice, as a supervisor, and with the “law as lived.” Our clients’ needs were not anticipated by the law school curriculum and required responsive and holistic legal services.
Julian Webb
Melbourne Law School,
Australia
Julian Webb is a Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where he has taught Civil Procedure, Legal Ethics, and Legal Theory on the Melbourne JD. His current research projects focus on ethical and regulatory issues arising from the use of new legal technologies, on lawyer wellbeing and the ‘ethical climate’ of practice, and more generally on organisational culture in the legal profession. Julian also researches legal education policy and regulation and has taken leading roles in legal education reform projects in the UK, New Zealand, and Hong Kong, as well as for the UN Development Programme. His publications include Nicolson & Webb’s Professional Legal Ethics: Critical Interrogations (Oxford UP 2000). Maughan & Webb’s Lawyering Skills and the Legal Process (Cambridge UP, 2005) and Leading Works in Legal Ethics (Ed., Routledge 2023). His paper, ‘Legal Technology; The Great Disruption’ in Abel et al (eds) Lawyers in 21st Century Societies: Comparisons and Theories, was shortlisted in the Australian Legal Research Awards, 2022.
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