Teaching and the Law

‘Why I left the law to teach – and became headteacher in just six years’

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It is important to note that most educational establishments already hold the relevant licences mentioned above. The combination of these educational licensing schemes and copyright exceptions means that teachers and students do not have to worry about seeking permission every time they want to use a copyright work for educational purposes. There have not been many cases concerning the use of copyright materials in educational establishments. The tribunal concluded that if copies of artistic works were to be included in course packs as opposed to ordinary class room use an enhanced licence fee was payable.

The law on use of copyright materials in educational establishments in the United Kingdom is found in Sections of the Copyright Designs and Patent Act , which you can read here:. For the changes to sections 32 copying for teaching , 35 recordings broadcasts and 36 copying and using extracts of works made by the Copyright and Rights in Performances Research, Education, Libraries and Archives Regulations see here:.

The Copyright Myth-Reality Cards consist of text and illustrations, with a copyright myth on one side and the true status on the other. Teachers and students at Bournemouth University discuss the role that copyright plays in their work and share their most pressing concerns and questions about copyright. Ruth Soetendorp and Bartolomeo Meletti Illustration: Davide Bonazzi The use of materials protected by copyright is essential to the learning process. Exceptions for education and teaching One of the most important exceptions for education permits the use of any type of work for the purpose of teaching or as the law puts it: However, the exception only applies under the following conditions: Compiling anthologies for educational use that include published literary or dramatic works No more than two pieces of a copyright work can be included in an anthology within a five-year period, and only provided sufficient acknowledgement is given.

Performing, playing or showing copyright literary, dramatic or musical works in the course of activities of an educational establishment This exception applies where the audience comprises teachers, students and others directly connected with the establishment, and extends to cover showing a film to such an audience.

Recording of a broadcast for use in an educational establishment In order to record a broadcast and play the recording within an educational setting, a licence from the Educational Recording Agency is required. Copying and using extracts of works The law provides an exception that allows an educational establishment to make copies of extracts of certain types of work everything apart from broadcasts and free-standing works or art for the purpose of instruction.

The law on use of copyright materials in educational establishments in the United Kingdom is found in Sections of the Copyright Designs and Patent Act , which you can read here: Going for a Song. The Game is On! Where an authority makes an error in payment of salary, it has the right of recovery as long as in doing so the recovery is just and equitable in the circumstances. If, for example, an age allowance is not halved or having been informed that a teacher is an ordinary graduate the teacher is paid as an honours graduate, then recovery of overpayment is possible.

If, at the request of the teacher or at the authority's instigation, the service of the teacher is recalculated at any time, no recovery of overpayment is possible and the new assessment is effective from the next full pay month. Where, for any reason, a mistake in salary has been made, the authority is required to correct the error as soon as it is discovered. Where recovery of payment is sought by an authority on the grounds of clerical error, a clear description of the error should be provided and the agreement of the teacher obtained as to the rate of repayment.

This should never be less than the rate at which the overpayment accumulated. Slander or libel occurs when an untrue and damaging statement is spoken or written and thereby communicated to others. Truth is a defence against accusations of either. Matters of public interest, privileged exchanges, genuine ignorance of the implication of the defamation, offers to make amends, e.

With regard to teachers it is accepted that non-malicious allegations by parents, based on reports of pupils are unlikely to be actionable, otherwise complaints against teachers would be inhibited to an unacceptable degree. Once, however, a complaint has been investigated and found to be groundless, further repetition of the same or similar allegations could give rise to court proceedings. Teachers are properly vigilant of their professional reputation. Unfortunately, and too often, the least effective means of defending a reputation is a court action for defamation due to the publicity should action attracts.

The Employment Relations Committee consists of serving teachers with experience of most of the difficulties with which their colleagues are presented. The Committee is informed of the conduct of every case involving legal assistance and of all other cases that have implications for the generality of teachers.

Members can be certain that all aspects of cases before the Committee are treated with the greatest care. The Committee is serviced by the Employment Relations Department. At the disposal of the Committee are our advising solicitors who specialise in particular aspects of the law which affect teachers. The Committee reports its work to Council in the most general terms but maintains full confidentiality in respect of individual cases. In such a curriculum, students learn doctrine in the main curriculum and skills and possibly professional identity in a separate curriculum.

Whether simulations can recreate the pressure of having a real client depending on the lawyer is also a potential issue. In this Part, I first focus on facilitating innovation at the level of an individual law school. This discussion is informed by my experience at one particular school, the University of Denver Sturm College of Law Denver Law , but it emphasizes the parts of our experience that should be applicable to other law schools.

In , the faculty at Denver Law engaged in an intensive strategic planning process. In this process, it became apparent to the faculty that 1 in the coming years, we would increasingly be called upon to provide more value to our students, particularly in the sense of helping them maximize their chances of finding good legal jobs; and 2 a key way in which we could do so was to adopt the recommendations of the Carnegie Report, with the goal of producing more practice-ready lawyers our Modern Learning Initiative. A second key part of the plan is to adopt specialization tracks that allow our students to gain and demonstrate substantive expertise in five areas 1 in which the school has or can easily build strength, and 2 that we believe will yield good employment opportunities for our students in the coming years our Specialization Initiative.

We also made a commitment to diversity and inclusiveness, which has yielded significant progress. But in , we did not have the capacity to offer that magnitude of experiential learning opportunities. The question, therefore, became: How could we substantially increase the number of integrated, experiential learning opportunities we provided to our students?

Our approach at Denver Law was to expand all three types of experiential learning opportunities: However, for reasons I explain in this section, the most promising of those expansions in terms of being replicable at other law schools is likely to be in the area of course simulations. Through a fortunate set of circumstances, Denver Law was able to expand its clinics.

Specifically, our university had provided ten new tenure-track faculty lines to support our strategic plan. So we were able to allocate five of those new lines to our clinic and also were able to add budget for litigation costs and summer coverage for those five new lines.

I. The Carnegie Solution

But the plan was to hire five new clinicians, irrespective of that retirement. At a student—faculty ratio of 8—1, those five new lines will provide forty new clinical opportunities to students per semester, or eighty per year. We chose a mix. However, it is worth noting that there were two issues at play in this decision: If we were looking to maximize the number of students who could participate in our clinic, we would have added the new lines to one-semester clinics. That way, each semester, forty new seats would be open in the clinic.

However, if we were looking to provide full-year experiential learning opportunities to all third years, the distribution would not matter. Either way, there would be eighty new clinic seats open over the course of the year. Whether different students filled these seats in the fall and spring would not matter; we would have provided the same experiential learning capacity, merely distributed differently. Although these resource allocation issues were considered, our focus in deciding between adding one- or two-semester clinics was primarily pedagogical.

Because our clinics are generally equivalent to two courses six credit hours , for purposes of adding experiential course capacity, these five lines should effectively add the equivalent of class seats in experiential learning per year. So if we are looking at adding seats to the clinic which is important , adding these new lines provides eighty new seats in the clinic. The fact that a clinic provides six, rather than three, credit hours helps to accomplish this goal—creating three-hour opportunities.

But standing alone, it is not going to close our experiential learning gap. Additionally, it is rare to have this level of resources for clinic expansion. So this way of adding experiential learning capacity is not likely to be replicable at many schools. We also looked at the possibility of adding experiential learning capacity in our Externship Program.

That did not make much sense for us, as we already were placing more than students per year in externships. Accordingly, our plan focused more on ensuring quality in our extern placements and less on increasing the number of placements.

1. Student records – protecting students’ information

This is likely typical for many law schools. Because externships are an extremely cost-efficient method of providing experiential education, 50 See supra Part II. At this point, for most schools, the primary limits on externship capacity are 1 the capacity of their local legal community to absorb externs, 2 the willingness of students to pay tuition and provide free labor, and 3 the capacity of the school to control quality and provide a meaningful educational component to externships.

While we did not expand the number of traditional externships we offer, we piloted and have now adopted a special type of externship called the Semester-in-Practice SIP Program. The typical externship is three or four credits, 51 See, e. Traditional externship students tend to do their externship as a small part of a larger course schedule usually one of four or five courses , and do not have time to immerse themselves in their externship.

The Semester-in-Practice is fourteen credits eleven field credits and a three credit seminar. Thus, students in this program have the externship as their only class during the semester. This permits a much more in-depth experience. It also allows for placements that might be geographically distant from our school, such as in another city or even another country.

Finally, an incidental benefit of the Semester-in-Practice Program was to increase our experiential learning capacity.

We plan to regularly offer forty Semester-in-Practice positions per year. For each of the forty converted externships, we will have provided the equivalent of three new standard externships. Having increased our clinical and externship capacities as much as feasible, we next turned our attention to course simulations. We already offered a handful of simulation courses, even beyond trial advocacy.

Some of these courses involved small-scale simulations that were included in more traditional courses. For example, in my employment discrimination class, I do a two-week simulation of litigation strategy and discovery in a sexual harassment case based on the fact scenario in the movie Disclosure , 55 Disclosure Warner Brothers Pictures The movie is based on the book by Michael Crichton. Michael Crichton, Disclosure But some of our courses involved full-course simulations.

NUT Section

For example, Professor Roberto Corrada teaches a labor law class in which the students can unionize and then engage in collective bargaining with him over the terms of the class—including the format and curve of the exam. Building the Teaching Commons 21, 62—63 This is not for faint-hearted teachers. Instead of teaching labor law using casebooks, lectures, or Socratic dialogue, the students are immersed into a large-scale, unstructured problem, which they explore and solve in ways lawyers do.

Similarly, Professor David Thomson teaches a discovery course in which the entire course revolves around a case that has been filed. Thomson, Law School 2. Legal Education for a Digital Age —01 Tomerlin, The Practicality of Practicums: Again, there is no traditional textbook or traditional teaching. However, in such courses the textbook is both nontraditional and not used in traditional ways. The students write, serve, and respond to interrogatories and discovery requests, conduct depositions with court reporters, and file and respond to discovery motions—exactly the way that lawyers do.

These are courses that are offered in our subject matter specialty areas, designed to permit students to apply the knowledge they have gained in a series of specialty courses. For example, Professors Sam Kamin and Justin Marceau developed a constitutional rights and remedies capstone course, in which students litigate a complex constitutional case from client interviews through appeal, guided by a team of nationally recognized practitioners who partner with the two professors.

All of these courses integrate all three of the Carnegie apprenticeships. Given the cost of expanding clinics and some of the limits that schools have encountered in expanding externship capacity, we saw significant opportunities if we could expand the course simulations we offered. So we asked ourselves, how can we encourage more professors to teach using simulations? An extremely interesting thing that became apparent in our strategic planning process was the number of faculty members who were intrigued by the idea of experiential learning—and course simulations in particular—but who were not yet doing this type of teaching.

A substantial number of faculty members indicated that, although they were not currently doing course simulations, this type of teaching looked fun, and they could see the benefits that this type of teaching would have for our students. So the issue became how to get this group off of the fence and teaching using course simulations. The preferred way to induce faculty members to act in a particular way, particularly when they are on the fence, is to offer them incentives. And as a general matter, faculty members prefer two types of incentives: So we offered both. We solicited proposals to develop new full-course simulations that met certain guidelines for quality and for assessment.

Those whose proposals were accepted received stipends money , course relief time , or both. Another significant commodity among law faculty is love—that is, respect and appreciation. The stipends and time off discussed above not only provided material benefit, they communicated respect and appreciation for efforts in creating and teaching course simulations. So we regularly invite faculty members who are doing innovative things in their classrooms to give presentations to their colleagues. This not only spreads knowledge, it provides a venue for us to demonstrate the value we place on this type of teaching.

Notably, we also heard from faculty members that there was another reason that they were hesitant to try course simulations: Faculty members who might try simulations would be charting unknown territory. Not only would this mean that they might need to invest significant amounts of time developing new materials, they would need to learn new techniques. And if anything went wrong, or not as smoothly as they might hope, where could they turn for assistance?

So the stakes are high. At Denver Law, I have tried to address this by making adjustments on merit reviews for faculty members who take on new experiential learning activities in their classes.

Introduction

And our Promotion and Tenure Committee also takes into account classroom innovations that might lead to temporary dips in student approval ratings. The faculty presentations discussed above would help with know-how, as would bringing in outside speakers on course simulation, or even learning theory. But it is also important to have faculty members who have done this type of teaching make themselves available for mentoring and consulting for those who are wading into these waters for the first time. In fact, we had an excellent first-hand demonstration of just how valuable such support and mentoring could be in expanding course simulation opportunities for our students.

Professor Corrada spent many years developing his experiential labor law class discussed above. In other words, wheels do not need to be reinvented. Knowledge about experiential learning is extremely transferrable, which permits significant leverage where faculty members are willing to share their work and their wisdom in this area. Leadership is important in an initiative like this.

Accordingly, I appointed a Chair of Modern Learning. See Press Release, Univ. The endowment provides a substantial budget that the chair can use to advance experiential learning initiatives. However, the initiatives described in the text required little in the way of budgetary support. Other schools have created an associate dean position for leadership in experiential learning, instead of a chairperson, 66 For example, Northeastern has an Associate Dean for Experiential Education Professor Luke Bierman.

See Luke Bierman , Northeastern U. Other law schools that currently appear to have either deans or directors of experiential learning are: Margolis , Case W. Brooks , Drexel U. Gundlach , Maurice A. Kenn , Syracuse U. The appointment of a leader in this area sends a strong signal to the faculty on the importance of this type of teaching. And the person in this position can coordinate many of the activities discussed above. For example, such a leader can request proposals for experiential course development, and also help select proposals for awards of stipends and course relief.

He or she can either provide or coordinate mentoring and support from other faculty members or even outside of the faculty. At Denver Law, our Modern Learning Chair has engaged in three additional activities that have proven extremely valuable. First, he has convened the Modern Learning Committee. This committee includes the directors of each area of the law school that does experiential learning, including our Clinic Director, Externship Director, Lawyering Process Director, and Advocacy Director, a handful of adjuncts that use course simulations, as well as those professors that received stipends for course development in the last year.

This committee hears reports and provides feedback on experiential learning in each of these departments, allowing for the transmission of valuable knowledge across traditional department lines. Second, along with the Modern Learning Committee, the chair arranges educational programming for the faculty. Such programming has included presentations and brown bag discussions. The programming now also includes a distinguished lecturer on experiential learning each year. See Carnegie Report , supra note 6. The same year, we also hosted a parallel distinguished lecturer in our scholarship development program, who also happens to be a national leader in experiential learning: Jane Aiken, from Georgetown Law Center.

Aiken , Georgetown L. Finally, the Modern Learning Chair has reached out to the local legal community to explore opportunities to partner on experiential learning. These partnerships have included recruiting adjuncts who teach course simulations, supporting other adjuncts who are interested in trying this type of teaching, and pairing practitioners with full-time professors—a particularly successful model for teaching course simulations.

All of the methods for facilitating innovation at the law school level discussed above are likely to be effective in and of themselves. But they are likely to be more effective if there is significant faculty buy-in. There are, of course, numerous ways to get faculty buy-in. At Denver Law, we built buy-in through our strategic planning process. A committee of elected faculty members, along with the dean, led the planning process—both research and drafting. That committee sought regular input from the rest of the faculty, as well as the other key stakeholders, including informal and formal discussions and brainstorming sessions.

The faculty was therefore deeply engaged in the research for the plan, which demonstrated both the need for and the opportunities that would accrue from this type of innovation and reform.

At the end of the process, the faculty voted to adopt our strategic plan by an overwhelming margin. The other positive by-product of this process was that it provided a forum for the open airing and discussion of potential objections to the plan. These discussions helped our faculty recognize that few objections were in fact deal killers. In fact, in most cases concerns could be accommodated within the plan.

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