An article by Marton Ribary (RHUL) and Antony Starza-Allen (Surrey) published in the Legal Education Review provides first-year law students with a simple conceptual scaffolding as a pragmatic educational starting point to construct effective arguments in Contract Law without drowning in analytical complexity.
The fully open-access peer-reviewed paper with the title “Computing Legal Analysis: A Guided Approach to Problem Solving in Contract Law” was authored by Marton Ribary (RHUL) and Antony Starza-Allen (Surrey) and published in the Legal Education Review.
The paper proposes a guided methodology for problem solving in a first-year undergraduate contract law module. Developed from our teaching practice and inspired by theories of computational modelling, our approach helps students to identify and extract legal information from primary and secondary sources, and to organise what they have learned into structured frameworks. The method creates scaffolding for learning and a framework through which legal issues can be identified. These frameworks can be used to locate legal information relevant to the construction of analysis and argument to the point of producing legal advice with confidence. The paper describes our approach in five distinct stages: (1) extracting doctrinal content from legal sources, (2) organising such content into a coherent framework, (3) applying the framework to problem scenarios, (4) constructing , and (5) writing up detailed, authoritative, and persuasive legal advice.. Our methodology embeds essential skills aided by a “semantic web” of concepts from which one could draw inferences, and uses computer-inspired visualisation for constructing arguments. Computational thinking allows students to visualise connections between the initial categorisation of legal information and the constitutive elements of a persuasive legal argument to articulate and demystify the process of producing legal advice.
Read the full article (open-access) here:
Marton Ribary and Antony Starza-Allem, ‘Computing Legal Analysis: A Guided Approach to Problem Solving in Contract Law’ (2023) Legal Education Review 33, 143
https://doi.org/10.53300/001c.90191
A previous version of the paper was presented at 113th Annual Conference of the Society of Legal Scholars at King's College London on 9 September 2022, and it was later discussed and received valuable feedback from colleagues in a Rights and Freedoms research cluster seminar at Royal Holloway’s Department of Law and Criminology on 23 November 2022.
Marton and Antony continue their exploration of new approaches to teaching contract law. They are currently experimenting with adapting the open-ended Lego Serious Play methodology to create an instructional working game which assists stage four of the methodology described in the LER paper, that is, constructing analytically deep legal advice using Lego as a visual aid. They presented their idea at the inaugural LEGENDFest organised by the Legal Educational Games: Evaluation, Network, Dissemination (LEGEND) network at the School of Law of the University of Leeds on Tuesday 5 September. They are holding a student workshop at the University of Surrey on 4 December 2023, and hopefully another one at Royal Holloway in April 2024.
