Professor Erik Knutsen helps reshape U.K. legal education

Professor Erik Knutsen (far right) with civil procedure scholars from across the globe at the Oxford-Queen's-Osgoode Project on Teaching Procedure symposium at Herstmonceux Castle in June 2010

Professor Erik Knutsen spent three days in June at Queen's Herstmonceux Castle in England with civil procedure scholars from around the world. He helped start the process of reforming the way students are trained for one of the oldest legal systems in the world.

While procedure is taught to law students worldwide, the United Kingdom has yet to add it to its curriculum. Working with Professor Janet Walker of Osgoode Hall Law School – the visiting Leverhume Fellow at Oxford who led the effort – and Professor Adrian Zuckerman of Oxford’s University College, Knutsen helped organize the Oxford-Queen’s-Osgoode Project on Teaching Procedure symposium, a three-day conference funded by the three university law schools that ran from June 25-27.

“We had people coming from all over the globe - from Australia to Canada to Israel to the United States,” Knutsen says. “Everyone’s keen interest in pushing the envelope in civil procedure scholarship and teaching was inspiring enough to get us all there.”

The conference, which began with a dinner on June 25, and continued with an intensive workshop for the rest of the weekend, began the process of providing the community of scholars working in procedural law with new resources and ways of thinking about the subject for the future. Not only will the subjects of the presentations – which ranged from topics such as “What is civil procedure’s role in the law school curriculum?” to “How to build a community of procedural law scholars” – be important for adding the topic to the British curriculum, but they will also help advance procedural law education in other countries.
    
“It prompted a lot of ‘out of the box’ future-forward thinking about how to build a serious community of procedural law scholars,” Knutsen says. “This created not only a group with a common scholarly interest and agenda, but allowed us to learn from each other’s jurisdictional approach to procedure and how it is taught (or not taught) in law schools.”

Now that the conference is finished, the papers from it are due to be published on both sides of the Atlantic. The Osgoode Hall Law Journal is planning a special edition, and an anthology of the papers will be published in Britain by Hart Publishing.

“In the long-term, we hope to perhaps have a second symposium with further research topics,” Knutsen says, “perhaps an additional conference specifically on teaching civil procedure.”

“It was truly an ideal weekend,” he adds.