The use of learning journals in legal education as a means of fostering integrative learning through pedagogy and assessment

In the late nineteenth century Christopher Columbus Langdell, Dean of Harvard Law School, introduced a new pedagogy in law that was designed around Socratic teaching. Prior to this, most common law jurists had emphasised the importance of artificial, natural law reasoning which was prone to be more subjective, speculative, value laden, and ultimately illogical (Davies, 1994, p. 110). This new pedagogy placed law cases at the centre of students’ learning, and demanded much more from the students in terms of analysis and defence of legal explanations. In particular, it involved a case-dialogue method, where students are called upon to recount facts, argue legal principles and explain their reasoning in the lecture hall before an authoritarian lecturer. All of this was designed to mirror the combative realities of adversarial proceedings. So, for example, in a lecture, the lecturer might demand of a student the facts of a case, the legal points at issue, the court’s reasoning by reference to other cases, the underlying legal doctrine or principle, and the effect that an altered fact pattern might have on the outcome.