Interprofessional Education

Abstract

As legal educators consider how to improve the outcomes of legal education, maximizing the knowledge, skills, and values taught during the law school experience, consideration should be given to increasing interprofessional learning opportunities in the curricula. As Best Practices for Legal Education suggested, the creative thinking necessary for effective problem-solving includes an understanding of interprofessional dimensions of practice, but interprofessional opportunities are still the exception rather than the norm in legal education. Interprofessional legal education intentionally asks law students to blend the knowledge, skills, and values of two or more professions in order to address complex legal problems. Placing students in an interprofessional context allows them the opportunity to consider problem solving outside of the framework imposed by their own professional lens and frees them to achieve more holistic, comprehensive solutions to legal problems. Law school curricula should include opportunities to expose law students to interprofessional collaborations in order to aid in developing the skills students will need in order to address the increasingly complex problems they will face in practice. This section identifies the benefits of interprofessional education in law schools and urges schools to implement interprofessional education opportunities.

Keywords: legal education, interprofessional education, law schools, skills, experiential education, law teaching, interprofessional teaching

JEL Classification: I20, I21, I29, K00, K40, K19, Z00