A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

Enhancing learning in legal education
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the office had received a related enquiry from a Ms Catrin Cook. Both of these
correspondents are keen to pursue an application for judicial review.
Group B
You have been engaged by the English Estate Agency Association (EEAA), with
a view to defending it in case of any application for judicial review arising from
the Ash/Cook grievances. You have had such material as is available to Group
A made available to you.
In addition to the material gleaned from these prospective clients, your
preliminary investigations have produced a number of seemingly relevant items:
• Membership of the EEAA is not legally necessary either for firms of estate
agents or for individual practitioners working for them. However, the claim
that such affiliation is widely recognised as a sign of integrity is largely true.
Indeed, your investigations indicate that for those seeking to operate in the
mainstream property market such accreditation approaches are imperative.
• Mr Ash has been a Fellow of the EEAA for five years.
• The Director General of Fair Trading (DGFT) was conferred with powers to
regulate the estate agency sector in 1986. These powers appear, however, to
be held in abeyance.
• The EEAA regulatory regime has received the government’s explicit
imprimatur on a number of occasions in recent times. Indeed, the Minister for
Consumer Affairs stated recently that the EEAA had her ‘full backing as a
vital cog in the maintenance of good practice in the sector’.
Documentary evidence relating to facts mentioned in the brief is provided for
reference. Each group (comprising seven to nine students) should work together
to develop a substantiated legal argument concerning the disparate issues that
arise, and reflecting the interests of the various clients. This solution is to be
presented in a week three moot class in which each group should be prepared to
discuss the main points in its solution for around 20 minutes. In advance of the
moot class, each group is asked to submit a short skeleton argument on
Blackboard (a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)) in accordance with
instructions to be provided. Full information on the tasks to be completed by the
study groups and by each individual student is available on Blackboard.
(Example provided by Andrew Scott,
London School of Economics and Political Science)
Some advantages
As discussed above, law is very content-heavy and as traditionally taught can instil a
surface approach to learning where there is insufficient time to reflect on, question and