BLB1101-Australian Legal System in Context Week 1 Notes

Introduction, communication and team-building; active reading and verbal communication

Ex 1.1 [Ice-breaking exercise]

Ex 1.2 You will be allocated to a team group in this tutorial. Get to know your team members a little more deeply
and begin to develop a sense of being a team. (some leading questions might help: e.g. my favourite movie is
because , My pet hate is, If I had one wish I would ). Try to find one thing you have in common with
each of your team members.

Ex 1.3 Teamwork is important in the workplace, and development of effective collaboration skills is an expected
earning outcome of all law degrees.1 In your group and then with the whole class, brainstorm behaviours and
approaches that approaches/attitudes that and assist and inhibit positive teamwork experiences.
Ex 1.4 Actively read the material below extracted from the 2001 textbook by Kathy Laster.2 (Each group will be
allocated a section to review), underlining important parts, indicating words you dont immediately understand or
parts you would like further clarification of, and making margin notes you might find useful if re-reading this
paragraph in 10 weeks time.
Socialisation into a Culture: Starting University
Increasingly universities are social institutions designed to credential you for
taking your place in a specialised labour market. But the cultural ideal of a
university is to promote the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. As we will see
in Chapter 5 (Legal Reasoning), within the realm of university, the social world
is abstracted, analysed and tested. You are taught to 'discuss', 'debate' and
'analyse' or 'critique' problems identified as socially significant by the science
and culture industries. University education is intended not simply to cement
your understanding of 'what we know', but rather to introduce you to the ways in
which our society learns about itself so that you can, in turn, contribute to new
understandings.
While you are attending university you are learning about this particular culture.
As with all cultures, the rules are seldom clear and there is a good deal of tension
between the cultural ideals of this society and the way it puts these into practice.
The 'community of scholars', for example, are often busy and learning is not
always as rewarding as the rhetoric suggests. The pursuit of knowledge also
requires heavy-duty testing of what you have learned through examination.
Many first year students find their initial experience of university difficult. The
physical size and scale of the buildings, the large numbers of people, the
confusing timetable, the subject names and university jargon are all unfamiliar
and, at times, alienating. Another intimidating, but more subtle, feature of

Australian Learning and Teaching Council, BACHELOR OF LAWS Learning and Teaching
Academic Standards Statement (December
2010).<http://www.cald.asn.au/media/uploads/KiftetalLTASStandardsStatement2010%20TLOs%20LLB.pdf >
Threshold Learning Outcome 5 (TLO 5).
2
Kathy Laster, Law and Culture (Federation Press, 2nd ed, 2001).

university culture are the invisible, unspoken cultural norms that govern this new
world.
In your first year you learn to negotiate the rules of a large bureaucratic
institution. You also learn the more subtle social norms of the university. These
tend to model the values, language, behaviour and modes of thought deemed
appropriate for an educated middle class adult in this society. There are good reasons
for feeling somewhat overwhelmed. In 1995 the Centre for the Study of Higher
Education at the University of Melbourne undertook a large research project (First
Year of Campus: Diversity in the initial experiences of Australian undergraduates).

For most students, first year is challenging time. It often entails a change in living
circumstances, friendship networks, and the re-thinking of future goals. In vocational
schools, such as law and legal studies, intellectual ambitions are fused with the
objectives of professional education. The demands placed upon students in law
schools are notoriously exacting. In part this is because competition and hard work
are core professional values that law schools seek to instil into the student body. The
goal of intellectual development goes hand in hand with socialisation of novices into
the professional world of lawyers.
Socialisation Into 'The Law'
Law can be thought of as a community or subculture with its own language and ways
of thinking. [Study of ] legal reasoning, language and rituals [shows us that] the
legal system is ethnocentric placing high store on its own ways of doing things.
Lawyers also have a professional stake in maintaining their own cultural turf. The
university is the first stage of this initiation into a selective cultural group.
Some law students described the experience of their early days of university to us in
the following ways:
Coming out of high school you think you're pretty good. You've just
finished school, you've got the marks. You think, yeah, I'm here. And
well, I'll just do it. And suddenly you get to your first week of lectures
and you think: Oh my God! I don't understand anything! What am I
doing? What's going on? It takes a [while] to get over that feeling, to work
out what's going on.
.
Someone said to me in first year that if you meet someone who can think
about things as if they're not related to anything else in the world, then
you're talking to a law student.
Understanding law as a culture helps us to see why many students often experience
difficulty in coping with their early studies. The process of becoming a lawyer at law
school is a combination of the individual aspirations that students bring to law school and
the cultural messages instilled and exchanged there. Students correctly perceive that the
culture of the law school contains mixed messages. Some commentators argue that
adapting to the law school regime exacts an unacceptable price from students. Elkins
(1983:462) argues that the result is often a transformation of self. The initiation
experience of law school means that 'The person stands in a different place to view the
same world' (1983:451).
As with most cultural encounters, the process is often painful and bewildering. Once a
person learns to 'think like a lawyer', it can never be unlearned:
While the 'qualities' acquired in law school- analytical ability, precision, and discipline are necessary attributes of the competent lawyer, these qualities are often gained at the

expense of other desirable human values... This differentiation between head and heart,
professional and personal, is a 'splitting' which has profound significance for the way
professionals work and experience themselves as professionals (Elkins, 1983:458-9). 3

NOTE: The book from which these passages have been extracted uses an in-text referencing system.
In legal writing and writing for law units at VU, students must use instead a footnote referencing system
Australia Guide to Legal Citation 3rd ed (AGLC).

Ex 1.5 (a) (Discuss with your group the words or parts where you would like further clarification, and try to
summarise your allocated section of the work. Each team should be prepared to explain their section briefly to
the class.
(b) Post-class exercise: Re-visit these extracts towards the end of your semester; reflect on the extent to
which you agree and/or disagree with the various findings and opinions presented here.

Ibid 6-11.