Law & Social Change - Volume 9 (1)

Table of Contents:

 

Keren Glick Kamila Michman , Introduction

[Full Text – Hebrew

 

Duncan Kennedy , Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy

[Full Text – Hebrew]  

 

Yishai Blank ,Critical Legal Studies and Legal Education: Hierarchy, Rage, and What’s Next?

[Full Text – Hebrew] [Abstract – English]

 

 

Orna Ben-Naftali Amos Laor ,A Report to the Academy (on the Education of the Trainee K.): Reimagining Legal Education

[Full Text – Hebrew] [Abstract – English]

 

 

Vardit Dameri Madar , Reading Freire in the Clinic

[Full Text – Hebrew] [Abstract – English]

 

 

Tamar Kricheli-Katz Issi Rosen-Zvi Neta Ziv ,The Broken Promise: Hierarchy and Stratification Among Israeli Law School Graduates in the Twenty  First Century

[Full Text – Hebrew] [Abstract – English]

 

 

Ori Aronson ,  The Law from Trial Courts

[Full Text – Hebrew] [Abstract – English]

 

 

Dina Zilber ,“My Eyes Beheld Wondrous Things”: The High Court of Justice Department as a Place of Legal Education

[Full Text – Hebrew] [Abstract – English]

 

 

Perspectives on Legal Education

 

Daphne Barak-Erez , As for the One Who Knows Not How to Ask – Legal Education Facing the Inability to Know Everything 

[Full Text – Hebrew

 

Roy Kreitner , Curricular Reform at Tel Aviv: Faculty and Student Responsibility

[Full Text – Hebrew

 

Orit Kamir ,Viewing Through Conceptual Lenses: Classroom Application of Feminist Legal Theories to Feature Films (North Country)

[Full Text – Hebrew

 

Yifat Bitton , Teaching Torts Without Torturing and Distorting

[Full Text – Hebrew

 

Dori Spivak , On the Decreased Educational Role of Judges

[Full Text – Hebrew

 

Chaya Gershuni Rivka Lerner ,  A Robe of Modesty: Gender and Legal  Education in the Ultra-Orthodox Community

[Full Text – Hebrew]

 

Rabea Eghbariah , Arab-Palestinian Students in Israeli Law Schools: A Critical Reading of Legal Education in Israel

[Full Text – Hebrew

 

Anat Ovadia-Rosner ,Israeli Legal Education as Training for Competition

[Full Text – Hebrew

 

Anat Rodnizky , A Chilling Effect? The Initiatives to Regulate Academic Freedom and Their Impact on Legal Clinics in Israel

[Full Text – Hebrew
 

Abstracts:

 

Critical Legal Studies and Legal Education:
Hierarchy, Rage, and What’s Next?

Yishai Blank

Critical legal studies (CLS) was an intellectual movement that emerged and flourished in

the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. CLS radically challenged the foundations
of the dominant legal theories of the time, the way of doing legal academic scholarship,
and the mainstream cultural milieu within which it operated. As part of this critique,
critical scholars exposed the power and political dimensions of the legal system, the
indeterminacy and the ideology that inhere within legal discourse, the constructive role
law has for society and for markets, the difficulty to rely on the rights discourse for actual
emancipation, the oppressive nature of mainstream legal culture, the great importance
of spiritual and psychological liberation and they sought to point to a utopic horizon to
which we ought to aspire. Duncan Kennedy’s Article, “Legal Education as Training for
Hierarchy”, is exemplary of this type of legal critique. In this Introduction, I describe
the main theoretical themes of CLS, and show why, despite the passage of time since
its publication, and despite crucial differences between Israel and the United States,
Kennedy’s piece remains such a globally relevant CLS classic. The emotional intensity
that it exerts and provokes, the importance it gives to quotidian politics and the utopic
horizon that it outlines – all continue to disturb and challenge its readers, and to serve
as an alternative to existing legal scholarship, often characterized by its detached, cool,
abstract and cerebral nature. Israeli legal education in the twenty-first century is revealed,
unfortunately, as a location where unjustified social hierarchies still exist and weave
themselves into the lives of future jurists.

 

Full article is available in Hebrew here

 

A Report to the Academy (on the Education of the Trainee K.):
Reimagining Legal Education

Orna Ben-Naftali, Amos Laor

Reflecting on Duncan Kennedy’s “The Legal Education and the Reproduction of
Hierarchy”, “A Report to the Academy” tracks the development of the student K. Their
dialogue with K., while located in a particular time and space (Israel, 2017) transcends
this particular context insofar as it tackles fundamental questions about law and/as power.
The dialogue, while revealing reforms in legal education which responded to some
aspects of Kennedy’s critique, nevertheless points to its ultimate failure to escape from
the structures and paradigms which serve the reproduction of hierarchy.
In the light of this diagnosis, the authors reimagine legal education in a manner that
focuses on the multidimensional resolution of social and political problems. In such a
process, law is but one, and not necessarily the most important means. This new vision
impacts the curriculum, diversifies the participants in the educational process in a manner
corresponding to the stakeholders, and encourages a constant dialogue between them. It
is based on a continuous re-evaluation of knowledge as well as on the educational process
itself, disrupting the comfort zones of current legal education.

 

Full article is available in Hebrew here

 

 

Reading Freire in the clinic

Vardit Dameri Madar

Over the past three decades, clinical legal education has become integral to legal education
globally. While the nature of such programs and their goals may vary, there is widespread
agreement that clinical education should include a combination of legal theory and
practice and should reflect ‘law in action.’ Frequently, questions of social responsibility,
social justice, distribution of public resources and public policy formulation are integral
to work of the legal clinics.
This article, based on the groundbreaking and radical work of Brazilian educator
Paulo Freire, proves a theoretical framework intended to enrich the understanding of
clinical legal education while outlining the way in which his ideas can be realized through
the work of the clinics. In particular, the article highlights his ideas of addressing political
topics through education, his criticism of the predominant model of education which he
termed the ‘banking model of education’ and explicates the nature of dialogue that will
flow from this understanding of education. The article also notes the work of Prof. Zvi
Lamm who makes a distinction between political education and ideological education
while suggesting that clinical legal education should be understood as political rather
than ideological. Such discourse guides clinical educators when addressing issues of
social justice, social responsibility and equality with students and highlights opportunities
for encouraging and promoting critical discourse. Furthermore, Freirian’s Pedagogy of
Freedom is presented as a framework for understanding interactions between students,
clinical educators and clients. Such interactions can develop and deepen students
understanding of social structures and the ways in which these same structures may impact
the lives of their clients. Furthermore, students are given the space to critically analyze
social structures and to question socially predominant attitudes and views. Through the
clinics, students more deeply understand their own societies, have opportunities to be
active agents in their communities and, accordingly, serve as social change agents.

 

Full article is available in Hebrew here

 

The Broken Promise: Hierarchy and Stratification Among Israeli
Law School Graduates in the Twenty First Century

Tamar Kricheli-Katz, Issi Rosen-Zvi, Neta Ziv

The sharp increase in the number of lawyers since the early twenty first century made
Israel the country with the highest number of lawyers per capita. We set up our research to
investigate whether the legal profession enables its entrants to overcome the stratification
and inequality patterns, which characterize the Israeli labor market more generally. We
found that the surge in the number of law schools and lawyers indeed increased the chances
of people who belong to minority and underprivileged groups to enter the profession.
However, the legal profession preserves clear patterns of inequality based on nationality,
ethnicity, gender and class, in almost every respect. We found, for example, that women,
Mizrachi Jews, Arabs and law graduates from lower socio-economic backgrounds earn
less and are employed in smaller law firms compared to men, Ashkenazi Jews and
graduates from higher socio-economic backgrounds. The level of satisfaction from the
decision to study law was found to be correlated with the respondents social class, yet the
patterns revealed are surprising since they stand in inverse relationship to the level of the
respondent’s “success,” measured by the criteria commonly used to measure success in
the legal profession.

 

Full article is available in Hebrew here

 

The Law from Trial Courts

Ori Aronson

The article has two purposes: to question the complete supremacy of Supreme Court
decisions in the teaching of case law in Israel; and to call for a reform of law’s central
introductory classes, such that they will draw significantly from the products of trial
court adjudication. The article shows that the dominance of the Supreme Court in law’s
perception by both professors and students obscures the central role that trial courts have
in determining case law, as well as in shaping the actual experience of people in the
law. Based on this insight, the article suggests the contours of novel method for legal
education, that is premised on the work of trial courts as a central source for knowing
and understanding the law. This means more than merely drawing on new resources in
teaching the old contents of existing classes, rather it is a call for a conceptual shift in
our perception of the law as an object of learning, as well as in the kinds of signals we
ought to send our students as we prepare them to life in the law: from the abstract study of
theoretical questions, to an engagement with actual legal action, all with its complexity,
contradiction, and diversity.

 

Full article is available in Hebrew here

 

“My Eyes Beheld Wondrous Things”: The High Court of Justice
Department as a Place of Legal Education

Dina Zilber
This paper reflects on the High Court of Justice Department in the State Attorney’s Office
as an example of an environment that cultivates worthy public lawyers. The insights
presented reflect my personal experience over many years in the public legal service and
are also based on conversations with past and present lawyers in the HCJ Department.
The claims of this paper are two-fold. First, that legal mentoring, based on a clear
ethos, transmitted through practical experience and extended close-knit daily work,
results in [worthy] public lawyers who have imbibed the ethos, that is to say, the DNA, of
the HCJ Department. Second, claims that the legal mentoring which is grounded in this
ethos is the basis of the long-standing success of the HCJ Department in attaining its goal
– the impressive, successful representation of the State before the Supreme Court while at
the same time reinforcing the fundamental principles of the legal system.
To demonstrate these claims, the paper lays out the components of the ethos which
has infused the department for many years, in light of which it trains the legal clerks
and young lawyers that join its ranks. Thus, the paper discusses the dual role of lawyers
in the HCJ Department which includes, on the one hand, enabling the Government to
implement its policies by providing the best possible legal representation and, on the
other hand, acting as a gatekeeper; the role of the government lawyer in safeguarding the
rule of law, human rights and good governance; the role of values in the legal work of
the HCJ Department lawyer; the question of the identity of the client – the Government
or the public?; the role of the public lawyer in the representation of the Courts before
the Government and in the representation of the Government before the Courts; the
importance of an integrated representation of the State’s position before the Court; the
position that not every Governmental decision is defensible; the obligation of the HCJ
Department lawyer to present a complete picture before the Court, even when this may
harm the chances that the petition will be rejected; and additional fundamental rules that
guide the actions of the lawyer: procedural fairness and intellectual independence.
This paper demonstrates how the practical, daily routine of the HCJ department
has preserved its ethos over many years; and how, on the other hand, the occasionally
oppositional interaction with the political sphere and with other professional civil servants
shapes the ethos and its resilience.
In this transitional period, when the principles which lies at the foundation of the public
legal system are no longer subject to consensus and acceptance but rather challenged,
criticized and at times attacked. the importance of legal mentoring and the continued
assimilation of the ethos is of greater importance and essence.

 

Full article is available in Hebrew here

 

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