How can flexible delivery enhance the facilitation of a critical understanding of law?

Traditional approaches to legal education often fail to facilitate the adoption by the law student of a critical understanding of law. The discipline of law has also been slow to embrace the recent paradigm shift in other disciplines towards more critical approaches to knowledge. This tardiness on the part of legal education is best understood by consideration of five contextual factors:

• the emphasis upon training law students to be lawyers;
• the prevalence of doctrinal approaches to legal education;
• the inherent conservatism of the institution of legal education;
• the isolation of the discipline of law from other disciplines within the university; and
• the ignorance by many legal educators of contemporary pedagogical theory.

Can flexible delivery, with its emphasis on more active and collaborative learning through use of new technologies, enhance the facilitation of a critical understanding of law? My objectives in this paper are:

• to offer definitions of 'critical thinking' and 'critical perspectives' and to demonstrate how the two concepts and be reconciled into the concept of 'critical understanding';
• to discuss how each of the five contextual factors limiting 'traditional' legal education to facilitation of non-critical understandings can to some degree be overcome by the adoption of flexible delivery approaches;
• to describe the author's own experiences in developing and delivering a law subject in flexible mode; and
• to demonstrate how five of the common 'tools' of flexible delivery - the world wide web, email, bulletin boards, interactive software and discussion groups - can be used to facilitate a critical understanding of law.