Thinking in legal educ

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CRITICAL THINKING IN LEGAL EDUCATION: OUR JOURNEY
GABRIELLE APPLEBY, PETER BURDON AND

ALEXANDER REILLY^†

In early 2012, a group of colleagues in the University of Adelaide Law School formed a working group on critical thinking. The initial intention of the group was to discuss Margaret Thornton’s recent book, Privatising the Public University: The Case of Law and to consider its applicability to our school. To facilitate this discussion, we held several ‘reading groups’²and the Law School hosted Thornton for a presentation and interactive workshop.

Thornton’s book brought to Australia a critique of the corporatisation of legal education that is well established in other jurisdictions.³In one part of her analysis Thornton argues that the neoliberal competition reforms of the 1990s have led to an overly vocationally focused curriculum.⁴She also argues that effective teaching of critical theory and thinking have been ‘jettisoned’ in favour of a positivist-dominated curriculum: ‘[A] focus on doctrinarism, known knowledge and “right answers” has replaced the questioning voice.’⁵This has led to a focus on black-letter law,

^*Gabrielle Appleby, Senior Lecturer, Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide; Peter Burdon, Senior Lecturer, Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide; Alexander Reilly, Associate Professor, Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide.

¹Margaret Thornton, Privatising the Public University: The Case of Law (Routledge,

_2012).

²The group read extracts from Thornton, above n 1, and Law School Reform, Breaking the Frozen Sea (2010)

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