Teaching and learning of procedural law courses: an overview of the best practice in Malaysia

Procedural law courses are important components in legal education in all law schools in Malaysia. The courses include Civil Procedure, Criminal Procedure, Evidence as well as a more specific courses such as Bankruptcy and Winding-up. These are taught as compulsory courses in upper years in which students have already completed substantive areas of law. In law schools that include Syariah law (Islamic law) as part of their curriculum, Syariah procedural courses both for criminal and civil proceedings are also taught. Similar to many other professional courses, teaching and learning professional skills require special approach different from traditional approach of lecture and tutorial which centres on lecture-based instruction in classroom. On the other hand, a common critic was that local law graduates are in need of improvement in legal skills including those that aimed to be instilled in procedural law courses. In addition, studies on the aspects of teaching and learning procedural law courses have been rather limited especially in Malaysia. This paper explores the best practice in teaching procedural law courses by reviewing the existing literature relevant to the subject matter and finding from a focus group discussion involving selected law teachers in teaching procedural law courses in some law schools in Malaysia. This is significant to contribute towards improvement of teaching and learning of the procedural law courses in law schools