Michele Leering is focusing her doctoral research on exploring the possibilities for enhancing and reforming legal education for two goals: to better prepare students for an uncertain future and for better meeting societal, individual and community expectations of legal professionals. For her work, she draws on her experiences as a lawyer and the executive director of a non-profit community legal clinic and her Masters of Adult Education degree from St. Francis Xavier University. She is a member of the International Legal Aid Group and has worked with the Open Society Justice Initiative, Ukraine’s International Renaissance Foundation, and Namati to provide training on legal empowerment and community lawyering. As a member of the Canadian Bar Association’s Access to Justice Committee, she chairs its Legal Education Working Group that produced an experiential learning guide for Canadian law students. At Queen’s, she is the holder of three fellowships and has received two awards. 

In an interview with Queen’s Law Reports, Michele Leering talks about her PhD research, including “integrative reflective practice” as an emerging theory of how professionals most effectively learn.

Why are you interested in researching legal education and exploring the enhancing of legal professionalism? 

I have been deeply concerned by the findings of empirical research studies – studies that don’t seem to be discussed in many law schools – about the growing inability of ordinary people to access timely legal information, advice or more formal help with common legal problems. These problems include issues with housing, income security, employment, consumer contract and debt problems, discrimination, being a victim of crime, etc. A lack of legal literacy and legal capability, compromised legal health, and an inability to access appropriate professional help all have serious and debilitating consequences for the mental, physical, emotional health and well-being of people who are most vulnerable.

My professional passion has been finding ways to increase access to justice (A2J): I believe is a responsibility integral to legal professionalism. As a community lawyer for more than 30 years, working with vulnerable people and communities, I’ve witnessed the societal and personal health costs of growing justice gaps. 

Vivek Maru (Namati) would describe A2J as legal empowerment and the ability to “KNOW, USE and SHAPE” the law.
By A2J, I mean more specifically:
•    Information about the law, legal rights, and “paths to justice” – supporting legal literacy and legal capability
•    Services to help navigate the system, improve legal health, prevent legal harm, and solve problems
•    Promoting justice through reform of unjust laws and adopting new laws
•    Engaging in systemic advocacy to improve policies, practices and programs
•    Ensuring accessible enforcement of rights.

Legal professionals need to do more to encourage “legal health.” Recent Canadian and international A2J studies confirm that we do not do enough to intervene early and prevent legal problems before they lead to a downward spiral of unresolved legal troubles, resulting in health-harming impacts.

This passion led to my current research on legal education. I’ve explored how medical professionals are educated – they must develop competencies related to seven key roles they play – medical expert, and scholar, collaborator, communicator, leader, professional, and health equity advocate. I think refocusing legal education to support the future roles the profession needs to fill makes a lot of sense. We’ve understood our professional role far too narrowly.

How can legal education better prepare students to be “equal justice advocates” with an “access to justice consciousness?” This role could be developed similarly to the “health equity advocate” role that expects a medical professional to help ameliorate the adverse impact of the social determinants of poor health and systemic injustice. As legal professionals, we should be leaders in ensuring equal justice is a reality. Along with our powerful professional status, self-regulation, and privilege come public service duties. In these troubled times, when justice is mocked and rights disregarded in many countries, these duties carry an even stronger imperative.

My cross-disciplinary research revealed that doing more to ensure that legal professionals have the capacity for “integrated reflective practice” – or “reflective professionalism” would be helpful. This capacity would better equip students to be both “justice-ready” and “practice-ready.”

However, even if you don’t agree that legal professionals have a responsibility to ensure A2J there are other imperatives for change – we are a profession in crisis. Our troubles include the challenges presented by globalization, unsustainable business practices and business models, increasing distrust of lawyers, and the impact of AI and ICT, as well as issues of poor mental health and well-being. We must better prepare students for this uncertain future – whether their practice will be as a law professor, judge, policy maker, or lawyer. Richard Susskind has had much to say about this as has the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) in their Futures report. We lag about 30 years behind other disciplines in our thinking about professional education. 

I became interested in the possibilities for positive change as I examined my own professional disappointments including my experience as a law student at another university several decades ago. My research has shown that my experience was not unique: legal education has not responded sufficiently to the need for change, despite multiple legitimate critiques. 

Tell us about your research.

My research supports positive change by building on the best of what is already happening in legal education in four commonwealth countries. Through my research, I foster dialogue with educators who care about the effectiveness of their teaching and want to support a more reflective and resilient legal profession. I explore how “reflective practice” (aka “reflective inquiry” and “reflective professionalism”) improves the quality of legal education.

Problem-based learning, active learning, experiential, and clinical legal education are all teaching methods that benefit from reflection. Student learning is improved by disciplined reflection even in traditional substantive law subjects. Critics might say that reflection is counter-cultural in law! However, it is not because the most creative and innovative legal thinkers, professors, judges, lawyers, and law faculties are very reflective. We just haven’t known what to name this capacity. 

To help with this NAMING, I’ve developed a working concept of what it means to be an integrated reflective legal practitioner and teased out the components of effective and efficient reflective practice. It is not about navel-gazing or woolly-headedness: it is strategic and focussed. Becoming a reflective professional means that you are concerned about:

1. Improving your practice and building professional knowledge through constant deliberative reflection on whether it is effective and how it can be improved. This domain of reflective practice is the baseline, the minimum professional capacity, and endorsed in all other professions. We must get better at becoming reflective from the first day of law school: constant exercise builds a stronger reflective muscle. 
2. Being self-reflective – you become conscious about your own professional beliefs, values, and identity. You recognize your emotions, personal biases and assumptions and their impact on your perceptions. You explore your cultural competency, and hone your ethical sense. This is the domain of personal integrity, authenticity, commitment and your moral compass. Your mental health and well-being depends on a finely-tuned muscle.
3. Becoming critically reflective – this is a broad domain and incorporates the critically reflective aspects of a high quality and robust legal education – if you allow in these opportunities for critique. This supports improved “legal reasoning,” but it also allows for interrogating concepts of justice, law, ideologies, philosophies, paradigms and mental models. 
4. Enhancing the capacity to reflect productively with others – the domain of collective reflection. This supports a greater capacity for dialogue – generative and reflective – not just “downloading” and “debate.” This includes listening into difference and future possibilities, transforming conflict, more creative problem-solving, to produce better outcomes. 
5. Developing the capacity for integrative reflection. The different domains of reflection should influence each other leading to deeper insights and aligned commitments.
6. Praxis is the sixth domain. Exercising our reflective muscles permeates everything we do. Reflection becomes an automatic reflex: an integral part of legal professionalism.

I’ve presented on my research at approximately 40 conferences in Canada, Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. I’ve published two articles on reflective practice, blogged on the scholarship of law teaching and learning, and participated in the LSO’s licensing consultation. I also helped create the CBA’s new experiential learning guide for law students. 

My qualitative research study includes a literature review spanning legal education scholarship across four countries as well as health and other professional scholarship on reflective practice. I have interviewed approximately 55 legal educators in Canada and Australia as well as conducted two in-depth case studies. I’ve gathered pretty robust data.

Introducing reflective practice is not without its challenges, and the forces militating against change in a conservative profession can overwhelm–but the timing of this research is optimal.

What motivated you to get involved with the Community Advocacy & Legal Centre (CALC) in Belleville, Ontario? 

I went to law school because I was concerned about social justice and wanted a legal education that would help me help others use law as a tool for tackling injustice. I was lucky to land a position in a non-profit community legal clinic. As CALC’s Executive Director/Lawyer, I practise law in traditional and unconventional ways. I could not have asked for a more fulfilling and diverse career. Working part-time at CALC keeps me grounded in the reality of “law as lived” and endless motivation to continue my research.

I’m now using my new research expertise at CALC. I’m engaged in action research to develop justice and health partnerships and an empirical research study of the unmet civil legal needs of incarcerated people in a detention centre.

How has your experience as a member of the International Legal Aid group had an impact on your graduate work?

Participating since 2009 in the International Legal Aid Group (ILAG) has been transformative. 
I’ve met amazing academics and senior legal aid executives who devote their professional lives to understanding access to justice. I now understand how important empirical research is to understanding how law actually operates in society, and why people take or don’t take their problems to law. We must also engage in evaluative and empirical research to understand what solutions are effective, and the impact of our work.

My graduate research has led to consulting with Open Society Foundation (OSF) and Namati, a global legal empowerment initiative, to support critically reflective practices in community-based justice organizations, and access to justice measurement frameworks for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 16.3.

How you have been working with Queen’s Law students to increase their awareness of access to justice issues?

I’ve spoken to first years about the access to justice imperative and reflective practice. I host LAW-698: five students working weekly at community legal clinics in Belleville and Cobourg, and participating in monthly seminars. I’ve supervised an independent study project and helped develop the Interdisciplinary Rural Professionals course. I’ve collaborated with academics and the CBA on Learning Law in Place. 

Why did you choose Queen’s Law for your PhD studies?

After completing a Master of Adult Education, a serendipitous meeting with Professor Paul Maharg while at Australian National University led me to consider doctoral studies. An equally serendipitous meeting with Queen’s Law’s then-Associate Dean of Graduate Studies Sharry Aiken led to my graduate work co-supervised by Professors Aiken and Knutsen. 

Now I have the best of both worlds – academic study and community-based legal practice – and the synergies between the two worlds inspire me!