Legal education as an app

As apps increasingly find their way into everyday life, they also accompany students, lawyers and teachers in their everyday tasks. The idea of Law as an App can certainly help to create better learning and professional environments if applied in the right way.

Pam Storr and I recently published a blog post on apps in legal education on VoxPopuLII.

We identified three aspects that are currently lacking in legal education – namely identifying and managing risks, interaction between different areas of law, and proactive problem-based learning – and suggested three ways to tackle these challenges:

• Legal aspects of apps: by using apps as objects students have to work with different subject fields within law in order to ensure a particular app fulfils potential legal requirements, adding proactiveness and problem-based learning to their education.
• Law’s implementation in apps challenges the students to think about how law can be implemented into everyday life and how it could help users, citizens and consumers to avoid legal pitfalls, thereby tackling all three of the above mentioned aspects.
• Legal education as an app provides the students with a companion throughout their legal studies, allowing them to make connections between different areas of law and increases the interactiveness of law studies; depending on the design of the app elements of risk and proactiveness could also be included.

We should note here, that we understand the term app rather broadly and do not refer to a particular platform or technology. In order to ensure equal access for students and teachers alike, the app or service should of course be available on all – or at least the most common – platforms and devices.

Pam & I will further attempt the implementation of the first two approaches in the Master Programme in Law and IT this year. We will keep you up-to-date on our experience and successfulness.

You can read the full blog post here.

[NB]: If you are interested in the topic Law as an App, here are some more resources:

• Jason Wilson; I Am Now an App™; Slaw, 28 September 2011
• Christine Kirchberger & Pam Storr, LaaS – Law as a Service, Lov&Data Nr. 4/2011
• Christine Kirchberger & Pam Storr, blog post Law as a Service?, Blawblaw, 30 March 2012
• Christine Kirchberger, blog post Law as an app, 25 January 2012