The editors of the Journal of Legal Education welcome articles and reflections in calls for papers for two special issues.

Scholars at Risk

The Journal welcomes papers on threats to academic freedom, coercion of legal and other scholars, and the relationship between legal scholarship, education and democracy both in the United States and around the world.

In recent years, people in a number of countries have felt the silencing of their voices, endured a rise in authoritarianism, and witnessed an erosion of governmental accountability. While regime changes are highly publicized, they typically come hand in hand with less visible threats to freedom of expression and attacks on diverse voices in every corner of society. Intolerant discourse at top governmental levels also has pervasive effects in sowing communitarian discord and marginalizing certain groups, as we have seen, for instance, with the rise in hate crimes against Asians all over the world this past year. Academia has a particularly privileged position to speak for those who can’t, but universities and other institutions of learning can also be especially vulnerable to attacks as an obvious locus of dissent. Legal scholarship has long concerned itself with freedom of speech, and the topic remains of daily relevance.

Individuals and organizations have worked tirelessly to help relocate Afghani intellectuals and others at risk. In many parts of the world, producing scholarly work in the face of coercive regimes has been a lifelong endeavor for scholars and intellectuals. In the United States, current efforts from some parties to ban the teaching or discussion of critical race theory in public institutions, some cases of tenure denial, withdrawal of offers of faculty positions, and other instances of clashes between academic freedom and politics have highlighted that democratic speech is a practice to be exercised, not an entitlement to be taken for granted.

From first-person accounts by legal scholars to empirical research on academic freedom and other analytical pieces on legal scholarship in the face of coercion, the Journal of Legal Education invites authors to submit their manuscript by June 30, 2022, to be considered for this themed issue.

Teaching Law Without Borders: Comparative Perspectives on Legal Pedagogy

The Journal welcomes articles and reflections on the methods of law teaching in different legal cultures.

Law is taught as an undergraduate/first degree course in much of the world, and as a graduate/postgraduate course in some places, as in the United States. Legal education is considered by some to be a professional degree, designed to teach students skills and analytical tools that can be applied across a range of practice areas. Elsewhere, it is more akin to a field of the humanities, where the intellectual discovery of arguments, theories and schools of thought is the object of learning, rather than the practice of law. Different approaches to legal education commend different teaching methods. Some are the product of tradition; some are designed to develop specific professional skills in an evolving profession. Even the subject matters of legal education vary across cultures. In many ways, the law–and legal education–are very much situated in a local political, social and economic context. Yet, in a globalized world where legal professionals in training increasingly seek a multinational and multicultural education, there are likewise opportunities for law teachers to share methods and pedagogical approaches.

This issue calls upon legal educators worldwide to share experiences, experiments and theoretical perspectives on the value of different approaches to legal instruction. These might include different forms of experiential education, models for integrating legal practice and theoretical learning, novel ways to engage students with legal doctrine, building interdisciplinarity in the legal curriculum, formats for skills-oriented courses, and more. Also of interest are full-scale imports of programs, such as the creation of PhDs in law in the United States or the creation of a U.S.-style Juris Doctor program in China.

Authors are invited to submit their manuscript by August 31, 2022, to be considered for this themed issue.

Submissions are subject to the journal’s usual peer-review process. Submissions must be exclusive to the Journal of Legal Education, and the editors make every effort to provide a decision in a timely fashion, typically less than a month after submission. For general submission information, please see jle.aals.org. Please note that the JLE uses the Bluebook style of citation. Questions may be directed to [email protected].