23 January 2009

LILAC09: CSI meets Murder, she wrote!

 Carole McCartney (University of Leeds), Roger Summers (Staffordshire University) and John Cassella (Staffordshire University) presented their attempt to bring forensic science into the law curriculum, detailing a current project at Leeds in collaboration with forensic science at Staffordshire.

Carole allegedly dropped biology at school as soon as possible, but is raising the pertinent question of whether lawyers really understand ‘science’ to the extent that they can employ experts and lead their evidence in court.  The fast pace of developments in science is not perhaps reflected in the law curriculum or in professional CPD.

A module at Leeds has been re-designed to make theoretical lectures more interesting and practical by using a mock crime scene at Staffordshire (involving a dead student!) with a variety of good and bad crime scene analyses.

Roger and John (the experts!) brought a practical aspect to the presentation. The audience were encouraged to pair up and look at some information and comment on the evidential and inferential value posted on the rear wall.  This was a great task, although rather hard as we only had 10 minutes or so to look over quite a number of statements, photographs and other resources.  I thought it might be interesting to see how students deal with this type of 'real world' problem solving in teams - in particular how they divide their tasks, who does what etc etc.

DSC00434

Participants were encouraged to complete the survey on forensic science on law programmes. Further details of Carole's project Bringing forensic science into the law curriculum are available, which will inform an expert workshop hosted by UKCLE and the Physical Sciences Centre on 27 May 2009 in Leeds.

23 Jan 2009 11:28:06 | LILAC

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
LILAC09: Project Panacea – Yes Minister meets Fantasy Football! Paul Almond – University of Reading Paul runs a final year module that looks at theoretical criminological concepts and applies them to a practical setting. It appeared that students couldn’t always make the link between theory and how policy/practice should be formed. The key question posed by Paul is ‘how can assessment tackle both elements and link them together’? Paul was inspired by a Reading seminar on problem-based learning (PBL) which described a real-estate module using real world clients and student groups would work on their issues or policies. The problem with the criminal justice system is the lack of,...
PREVIOUS POST
LILAC09: Going ‘beyond text’, ‘out for a walk’ and ‘telling a couple of stories’ in legal education The next four speakers seemed to be well connected in terms of looking at the law beyond the constraints of written statements, arguments, opinions, rules etc. Firstly, Zenon Bankowski set the scene with a new AHRC funded project to look at uncovering the hidden information that is not perhaps visible through a textual approach to the law. In particular, the problem a museum curator has when visitors refer to the catalogue to gain information on the object before them; and Wayne Rooney’s tempero-spatial awareness to know the past, present and future location of fellow players have commonalities that can be...

Michael Bromby

Search

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments