Editorial: Contemporary issues in legal education

This special issue of Journal of International and Comparative Law is a response to a number of ongoing issues: a changing academic climate, the development of more sophisticated theoretical models of learning and an increased focus on the student experience. Legal education is a complicated subject area, drawing as it does on explicit academic practice communities in education, psychology and sociology and implicit practice knowledge about legal knowledge, skills and identity. The discourse between these two “ways of knowing” is not always direct and open — indeed, it may be happening within the mind of the individual as well as between colleagues or (not) happening between legal, academic and political tribes. As a discipline, education has a large number of powerful metaphors and a limited number of high-quality comparative studies that subject these metaphors to the rigours of the real world; so in this issue, we have asked our contributors to put their values and beliefs “in harm’s way”