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Law and Method


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Article

Access_open Teaching Comparative Law, Pragmatically (Not Practically)

Special Issue on Pragmatism and Legal Education, Sanne Taekema & Thomas Riesthuis (eds.)

Keywords comparative legal studies, legal education, pragmatism
Authors Alexandra Mercescu
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Alexandra Mercescu
Alexandra Mercescu, Ph.D is lecturer at the Department of Public Law, University of Timisoara, Romania.
Article

Access_open Blended Learning in Legal Education

Using Scalable Learning to Improve Student Learning

Keywords legal education, blended learning, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, student learning
Authors Mr.dr. Emanuel van Dongen and Dr. Femke Kirschner
AbstractAuthor's information

    Education should be aimed at supporting student learning. ICT may support student learning. It also may help students to learn and increase their involvement and thus their efforts. Blended learning has the potential to improve study behaviour of students, thus becoming an indispensable part of their education. It may improve their preparation level, and as a result, face-to-face education will be more efficient and more profound (e.g. by offering more challenging tasks), lifting the learning process to a higher level. Moreover, the interaction between students and teachers may be improved by using ICT. A necessary condition to lift students’ learning to a higher (better: deeper) learning level is that all students acquire basic knowledge before they engage in face-to-face teaching. In a First-Year Course Introduction to Private Law, we recently introduced a Scalable Learning environment. This environment allows the acquiring and testing of factual knowledge at individual pace, in a modern and appealing way (independent of time and place). The link between offline and online education during face-to-face teaching is made by using Learning Analytics, provided by the Scalable Learning environment. After the implementation of Scalable Learning, a survey on its effect on learning has been performed by means of questionnaires. The results were compared at the beginning and at the end of the course, related to the approaches taken by teachers as well as to the exam results. This article presents the outcomes of this study.


Mr.dr. Emanuel van Dongen
Mr.dr. Emanuel van Dongen, Department of Law, Faculty of Law, Economics and Governance, Utrecht University.

Dr. Femke Kirschner
Dr. Femke Kirschner works as Educational Consultant at the Educational Development and Training, Utrecht University.
Article

Access_open Legal Philosophy as an Enrichment of Doctrinal Research Part I: Introducing Three Philosophical Methods

Keywords interdisciplinary research, reflective equilibrium, argumentation, philosophical analysis
Authors Sanne Taekema and Wibren van der Burg
AbstractAuthor's information

    In this article, we discuss a particular form of interdisciplinary legal research. We focus on a discipline that may be fruitfully combined with doctrinal research, namely philosophy. The aim of this article is to give an account of the methods of philosophy that are most relevant and useful for doctrinal legal scholars. Our focus is therefore mostly on legal philosophy and the philosophical subdisciplines closely related to it, such as political philosophy and ethics. We characterize legal philosophy in three complementary ways: as an activity, as insights, and as theories. We then discuss three methods of legal philosophy: argumentation analysis and construction, author analysis and reflective equilibrium. In the practice of research these three methods are usually combined, as we will show with various examples.


Sanne Taekema
Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Wibren van der Burg
Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam.