Abstract:

I. Location: The author presents this paper to the International Technology, Education and Development Conference 2009. Within its main goal -the promotion of international collaboration in the fields of Education, Technology and Research-, the author wants to show to the participants of the Conference a communication that includes three topics of it:
->Experiences in Education: the author presents to the participants of INTED 2009 a pedagogic experience that has put into practice in the course 2007-2008 with Law students.
->European Higher Education Area: the experience that is reported tries to present a new methodology in order to explain and learn Jurisdictional Law. This methodology answers to the postulates and requirements of the European Higher Education Area.
->Pedagogical and Didactical Innovations: Traditionally Jurisdictional Law has been taught from a theoretical perspective and its learning has been merely conductivist: law students limited themselves to repeat in an examination the contents acquired by the teacher without assimilating them. This paper shows a new teaching and learning methodology based on constructivist. Jurisprudence, courts words or practice, is used in order to explain the subject. Using it, and with the guidelines of the teacher, law pupils build the subject.
II. Jurisdictional Law and jurisprudence: basic concepts to understand the experience: Jurisdictional Law is one of the most important subjects of Law Degree. Studied during three courses (first, fourth and fifth), its aim is to teach pupils law practice, concretely, how plaintiffs and defendants (and their lawyers) have to act before a justice court, and how judges have to act in order to solve disputes. In this way, civil process and criminal process are explained.

With etymological Latin origin (prudential iuris, “discernment of the Law" or prudence of the judge), we understand jurisprudence as the set of the judgments of the courts and the doctrine that they contain. Unlike what it happens in the Anglo-Saxon environment -where judges must base their decisions on previous decisions-, in Spain the jurisprudence is not a Law source, but it is a basic instrument to understand the law. In this way, jurisprudence becomes a good tool to explain and study Jurisdictional Law.
III. Traditional teaching and learning of Jurisdictional Law: a heap of disadvantages: our subject always has been explained in a merely theoretical way. Intervention of the parts and of the judge in the trials was explained using a logical-theoretical scheme based on the development of a syllabus. This teaching and learning system was replete with faults: not assimilation of the subject, and specially of its practical perspective, a merely memory learning,…
IV. A new teaching-learning method of Jurisdictional Law: jurisprudence (courts words) as essential teaching-learning tool: Doing aside the traditional methodology, the magisterial classes based on the study of handbooks, and emulating case-law of the Americans, who study Jurisdictional Law departing from real cases and the processings and solutions that to them have given the courts, the course 2007-2008 the teacher realized a selection of 150 judgments of the Supreme Spanish Court and based the teaching and learning of Jurisdictional Law on them. The best aim of the paper is to explain the origin, the development and conclusions of this experience.

Keywords:

teaching-learning method, jurisdictional law, jurisprudence, law practice, case law.