Elon Law scholar co-authors article on the future of legal education

"The Double Life of Law Schools" by Elon Law Professor Steve Friedland and Ian Holloway of the University of Calgary will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Case Western Reserve Law Review.

<p>Professor Steve Friedland</p>
Given the changing nature of clients and legal work, those who teach at law schools across the United States and Canada must reconsider the outcomes, values and objectives of what they do should they want their enterprise to remain relevant in the years ahead, according to two scholars steeped in the emerging trends that define contemporary legal education.

Elon Law Professor Steve Friedland and Ian Holloway, dean of law at the University of Calgary, suggest that law schools will need to “reframe” themselves and establish more connections with the outside world, becoming more like that of a business or medical school than a liberal arts curriculum, with greater integration of its individual courses.

The two scholars argue “there should be a reinvigorated focus on connections between lawyering, clients and legal education” and that today’s legal education should connect with new realities – that lawyers today reach solutions collaboratively, and they manage projects and utilize a variety of skill-sets, all within a service profession requiring expertise in different but specialized knowledge domains

Their article, “The Double Life of Law Schools,” will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Case Western Reserve Law Review.

Friedland, a former assistant U.S. attorney and assistant director at the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Advocacy Center, serves as Elon Law’s associate dean for innovation in engaged learning in law. He is a founding faculty member of Elon Law, having joined the school in 2006 when enrolling the charter class.

As an associate dean, he examines traditional teaching methods in legal education and leads conversations on how to supplement those methods using technologies and techniques found to be successful in other academic disciplines. Friedland’s devotion to teaching can be seen in the awards he has won at three different law schools and his inclusion with 25 other law teachers in the 2013 Harvard University Press book “What the Best Law Teachers Do.”

Friedland holds a Juris Doctor with honors from Harvard Law School, as well as a Master of Law and Doctor of the Science of Law degrees from Columbia University Law School, where he was a Dollard Fellow in Law, Medicine and Psychiatry.

Holloway has served as dean of law at the University of Calgary since 2011. Prior to his current role, Holloway served as dean at the University of Western Ontario and as associate dean at the Australian National University. He is a graduate of Dalhousie University, the University of California at Berkeley and the Australian National University. He is also an alumnus of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.