The Gazette 1982

g a z e t t e

a p r i l 1982

48. (1816) 5 M. & S. 206. 49. R v. Edwards, supra, at p.35.

Law in School Curricula

50. Ibid., p. 35. Mr. Justice Davitt in McGowan v. Carville 11960| I.R. 330 expressed similar sentiments when he observed: "The 'peculiar knowledge' principle if applied to criminal cases generally and indiscriminately could have strange results. In many cases it is an essential element of the offence charged that an act was not merely done but that it was done with a particular intent. An intent is a state of mind, and if ever there was a matter which could be said to be peculiarly within a person's knowledge it is the state of his own mind. I have, however, yet to hear of a prosecuting counsel submitting that the onus of disproving a particular intent alleged rested on the defendant" (at p.337). 51. R v. Edwards, supra, p.40. 52. Zuckerman, The Third Exception to the Woolmington Rule (1976) 92 L.Q.R. 402, pp. 403-10. 53. Ibid., p.412. 54. Phipson on Evidence, 12th edition, p. 112. The Criminal Law Revision Eleventh Report Evidence (General) Cmnd. 4991 (1972) strongly recommended in paragraph 140 that burdens on the defence should be evidential only. 55. See Zuckerman, The Third Exception to the Woolmington Rule, supra, p.424. 56. Ibid., p.424.

Condensed from an address by Mrs Eileen Scott, Senior Lecturer, Bolton College of Further Education, to the Law Society's symposium "The Student and the World" at Blackhall Place, Dublin, in March. The function of the Bolton College of Further Education is to train teachers for the further education service, for the whole range of subjects that may be found in the colleges from craft engineers and builders, or to final professional students and undergraduates in virtually any discipline. My role is principally the training of lawyers and political scientists, most of them graduates but some with a variety of business studies qualifications which are deemed to equip them with the necessary subject matter. My first concern is not so much the 'what' and 'why' of curriculum innovation, but the 'how' of its implementation. It is in this field that the Law Society in England has concerned itself — in two directions. It has been involved in the publication of some teaching materials^ intended to be used in the teaching of law in schools by teachers not necessarily themselves trained as teachers of law. Young solicitors through their own organisation and their own committed members have embarked on the dangerous venture of actually going into the schools to talk about the law, or theirjobs, or whatever the school particularly asked for. It was here some of them recognised there was more to teaching law to teenagers than they had anticipated. At this point I met the young solicitors' committee officers and we have run two one-day courses specially designed to help practitioners tackle this rather different situation from their usual working experience. I worked with my own colleagues at Bolton, particularly a psychologist and a sociologist, to describe briefly the intellectual development of the teenager and then secondly how he interacts with his peers, while my task was to examine the range of teaching material available and how to select and use it. One first venture was considered successful enough to be reproduced in London at a sister college there with more specialised staff involved. Law is only one aspect of a broader spectrum of related subjects and while the teaching force lacks sufficient numbers of suitably experienced teachers to attempt to develop the subject, we shall have to use experienced lawyers on the one hand, hopefully properly prepared for the task and able to do something other than lecture, while we undertake the training of teachers probably experienced in some other social science area of the curriculum who are prepared themselves to become students of law or indeed politics — to equip themselves with sufficient subject matter content to be able to launch themselves with some confidence in this new area. Any attempt to broaden the curriculum in this way will be doomed to failure in my view unless considerable care is taken to develop appropriate course material, so that teachers and taught can explore the complexities together, and learn through experience. •

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