THE CASE FOR ENJOYMENT: EXTRA -CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES THAT TEACH LAW STUDENTS BY STEALTH

Our paper is a study of the use of well established extra-curricular legal skills activities, namely Streetlaw and mooting, not only as methods for teaching legal skills but also as highly effective tools in learning the substantive law.
Streetlaw requires students to research a given area of law and present the information to an audience, usually a community group or school, in a manner which can be easily understood by that audience. Mooting is the oral presentation of a legal argument on a specific point or points of law against an opposing counsel and before a judge. This paper is an examination of whether this process of research, investigation, understanding, organisation, creativity and dissemination of knowledge and/or presentation of a formal legal argument results in a more thorough and longer lasting learning experience than traditional teaching methods.
Of course this is hardly a novel concept, having its roots in Dale’s Cone of Learning and the work of John Dewey. However, the application of these and subsequent educational models to Streetlaw and mooting will help to determine whether these skills activities are useful as methods of facilitating self-directed study and problem solving resulting in deep learning.
It is our contention, based on the self-reflection of our own students and building on a wealth of educational theory, from Vygotsky to Martin & Oebel via Bloom’s Taxonomy, that this is indeed the case.