Purpose

“Learning in Place” gives students background and tools to enter an externship or other law-related work placement more confidently and reflectively. This text should help develop a set of professional and personal skills in the practice of law. This text and any accompanying class are one small part of an overall workplace experience. It must be read alongside a student’s externship, co-op or internship experience, filling common gaps between doctrinal or lecture classes. “Learning in Place” is not a replacement for substantive legal knowledge. Given that students enter a wide range of legal contexts, there is limited reference to the substantive law relevant to each setting. This material is typically introduced in doctrinal classes and the specific workplace setting. As students quickly learn, law-in-action is often quite unique between jurisdictions – even within the same province or territory – and different again from the law as it is written.

There are aspects of the text that overlap with some bar preparation courses, legal theory and professional legal ethics courses, and clinical courses. The text also canvases topics often left to “co-curricular” contexts such as mental health and wellness and career planning. Other topics include the context of law practice and common workplace challenges that shape the earliest days of becoming a lawyer. While there are definitions and substantive materials included here, this text is less about “knowledge transfer” than it is about ways of understanding and lending insight to legal practice and the interpretive lenses students will bring to their profession. It is for this reason that we start, here, with a quote from Paulo Freire. His method emphasizes the dialetic relationship between the student, teacher, and their environments. His emphasis on communication as the method by which this relationship is realized mirrors the pedagogy in many clinical and externship classes.

This text also takes theory and critical perspectives seriously. Therefore, students will see reference to theoretical and critical approaches intended to question how law is assumed to “be” and “be done”. It does not shy away from the thornier and more problematic realities of practice and law more generally. We have made efforts to supply resources and supports and to take a strengths-based approach (in short, a strengths-based or asset-based approach means focusing on a person’s or a community’s positive attributes and strengths rather than focusing solely on weaknesses or deficits). This text includes discussions of racism, sexism, intersectional oppression, and many other forms of discrimination.

How to Use this Text

1) Content Forecasts

Students will be differently situated when engaging with this text. Because the materials will impact students differently, the text includes content forecasts when there are stories of discrimination, harassment and abuse that are not obvious from the title. This is not to exclude or patronize but to express care and to allow students to prepare to engage with potentially difficult but essential topics.

2) Reflective Questions

Students will see reflective questions throughout the text. Reflective practice is essential to professional improvement, access to justice, ethical practice and wellness. Some questions and exercises will resonate and some will not. Students may wish to choose exercises and reflections that work for them and ignore others.

3) Skills

The text contains some substantive content on lawyering skills such as interviewing and client counseling. These are typically skills taught in the externship site itself, but students have historically appreciated a basic introduction. The text does not cover all substantive legal skills.

4) Order & Depth

The text does not need to be read systematically from start to finish. Students can choose which parts are most helpful at different points throughout an externship. Students can also read just the material written here, or may choose to watch the videos, follow the links and read more in-depth if a topic is of interest. Often, there are short quotes or excerpts from pieces that may pique a student’s interest. The reference or link to the full text is available throughout the text, as well as in the final “References” section at the end of each Chapter.

Theory of “Learning in Place

From a theoretical perspective, this text takes what other professions refer to as an “ecological view” of practice. This approach understands humans as shaped by their environments on many levels – including with themselves. It is usually used as a framework to understanding clients and communities. In this context, it situates the student/lawyer as a human in relationship to themselves, their immediate environment, their work context, and many other contexts and systems that shape experience. It also considers the systems that make up legal work environments – the workplace itself, its governance and management (boards, partners, etc.), and court systems. Finally, the ecological view allows us to consider sociopolitical, economic, colonial, and other systems that impact both individuals and systems – systems that often interact on clients and communities in harmful ways. The practice of law is shaped by relationships – the relationships of law students and lawyers to themselves, their communities, colleagues, workplaces, and environments.

This text also takes a legal realist bent that emphasizes the analysis of law as it exists in practice rather than how it exists in written law. This is because “law on the ground” – which students often confront in  an externship context – can be messier, more unpredictable, and varied than how it is often presented in texts. Social context also plays a much more significant role in legal reasoning than often presented; as such, students will be encouraged to consider the contextual background of practice.