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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”.
Politically, we are writing in a climate of accountability and value for money: it is a lengthy and expensive process to study the law, and students rightly demand that we demonstrate the utility and effi cacy of our curricula. In responding to this creatively and non-defensively, it is important to tease out the differences, for example, assessment regimes designed to meet the requirements of professional accreditation, assessment designed to demonstrate and reinforce mastery and assessment designed to highlight and pinpoint refl ective practice. It is unlikely that any one assessment can do all these things at once, so we tend to advocate for a mixed diet.1 This is a reasonable position provided that everyone involved knows what has gone into the pot and how it is supposed to operate on the student’s metabolism. Where this granularity is missing, we have students and faculty boiling all the vitamins out of the lettuce, while congratulating themselves for eating salad
JICL welcomes full length articles (generally not exceeding 13,000 words inclusive of footnotes), shorter contributions in the form of notes and comments (generally not exceeding 8,000 words inclusive of footnotes) and book review articles of not more than 6,000 words.
We accept contributions for consideration on an exclusive submission basis. When submitting an article please certify that it is an unpublished article (that is, it has not been previously published in substantially similar form or with substantially similar content) and that it is not under consideration by any other journal.
To facilitate anonymous review, please give the names of authors and their short biographical information and acknowledgments in a separate page.
Authors retain copyright in the words used, but upon submission of material for publication, grant Sweet & Maxwell a licence to publish the submission in print and/or digital formats. Sweet & Maxwell retains copyright in the design, format and layout of all material published in JICL.
Once submissions are published, authors are entitled to one copy of the issue, 10 offprint copies and a PDF version of the submission.
Authors who send articles published in JICL to other publishers or media must include a reference to the publication of the article by JICL and Sweet & Maxwell.
Contributions and book reviews should be submitted in Microsoft Word format by way of email attachment to Professor Anton Cooray at Anton.cooray.1@city.ac.uk.
Authors should follow the OSCOLA citation system (http://www.law.ox.ac.uk/publications/oscola.php), except that we prefer authors to use indenting sparingly.
JICL uses the following heading levels: Main headings are in bold and preceded by a Roman numeral; second-level headings are in bold and italics and preceded by an uppercase alphabet; third-level headings are preceded by an Arabic numeral; and fourth-level headings are in italics and preceded by a lowercase alphabet.