Legal Software: Maharg: Convergence and fragmentation: Research, informatics and legal education

miercuri, 8 octombrie 2014

Maharg: Convergence and fragmentation: Research, informatics and legal education

Paul Maharg of Australian National University has posted slides of a presentation entitled Convergence and fragmentation: Research, informatics and legal education , being given this week at Melbourne Law School.

According to Maharg’s new post about the presentation, “The paper is a version of draft chapter five of a book I’m writing, Genealogies of Legal Education [...]‘

Here is the abstract:

Fragmentation and convergence are two discoursal lenses that have been used to describe changes that we perceive in the domains of legal services, the legal profession, regulation and legal education. While they may appear orthogonal, the relationships between them are intimate, sophisticated and constantly shifting.

In this paper I shall argue that law schools need to engage with both processes. Fragmentation of knowledge offers law schools significant opportunities to reshape fundamentally what they do. Convergence opens up considerable dangers for law schools if the process is misunderstood or elided. To exemplify this argument and to begin to examine its strength as a tool for analysis I shall focus on one area of convergence, namely the three fields of legal information literacies, legal informatics and legal writing are sited. All three need to converge their interests if they are to gain status in the law school hierarchy of knowledge. I shall explore how studies in New Media on media convergence give us models for such convergence, and can show us the effects that the process may bring about.

HT @paulmaharg