The question which the Faculty of Laws has addressed during the last six years is whether law should be taught differently from how we have been teaching it in the past, that is, through traditional lectures where students are requested to absorb what they learn in class, deepentheir knowledge of the law through independent study and research, and memorising chunks of information in whatever form – be it legal provisions, case law and doctrine –in order to be able to reproduce it, together with one’s thoughts and research, in exams, assignments, tutorials and seminar presentations.

We concluded that the answer has to be in the positive because clinical legal education brings in a new dimension to legal education which encompasses experiential learning, that is, learning by doing.

Students, in this scenario, are more proactive rather than reactive: in the traditional lecturing method of learning, students are giving back the lecturer what they had learnt in class with some value added – their research and originality in approach – yet they are still within the confines of traditional legal education.

In clinical legal education, students are not passive receptacles on the receiving end; they are active participants in the learning process.

The result in clinical legal training is that rather thanrelying on memory, the student has to rely on legal skills; rather than studying for an exam and once the exam is over everything is put in the mind’s archive – not to mention the recycle bin – clinical education – which is more of a hands-on approach – ensures that what is learnt is more likely to remain with the student when he embarks upon a legal career.

Clinical education is, in a sense, the other side of the coin. Both traditional lecturing and clinical education are indispensable for the formation of legal professionals.

Perhaps in the past the Faculty of Laws has been emphasising more traditional lecturing without advancing and developing clinical education to the extent that is being done today which is more tuned for professional rather than academic life.

One must bear in mind that the Master of Advocacy and the Master of Notarial Studies degree courses, which have started to be offered in October 2016, lead to a professional qualification and are therefore more of a professional course rather than an academic course as is the case with the four-year Bachelor of Laws Honours degree course.

In the new Master of Advocacy and Master of Notarial Studies degree courses, which have replaced the Doctor of Laws degree, each degree programme consists of 90 ECTS, run from October to the following September and have 30 ECTS devoted entirely to professional practice.

Clinical legal education brings in a new dimension to legal education which encompasses experiential learning, that is, learning by doing

This component of the respective master’s course empowers students to explain to their supervisors why they are advising their clients to take certain decisions to the exclusion of others, why they are recommending one course of action to another, and students have the time to study at greater depth the consequences of these decisions and courses of action.

Whilst 30 ECTS will be devoted to experiential learning, the remaining 60 ECTS would be dedicated to the traditional information transmission mode of legal education.

In this way, the professional practice component of the master’s degrees provides this added value which has not been so far exploited to its utmost for the benefit of law students and the legal profession in general.

In order to arrive here, during the last six years, the faculty has been discussing the reforms of the law course on different levels: at heads of department and faculty levels as well as with the Chamber of Advocates and the Notarial Council.

I must thank the Chamber of Advocates and the Notarial Council for the excellent feedback they have kindly provided as well as the co-opted representatives of the chamber on the Faculty Board of Laws.

As to the future we look forward to the enactment of the Lawyers’ Act (which has been pending since 2010) so that even students studying to become advocates can move on to a two-year legal practice (prattika), as is recently the situation with notaries public, where the first year of legal practice for advocates will continue to be that currently offered by the Faculty of Laws in the Master of Advocacy degree course while the second year, could be devoted to a structured supervised and assessed regime of internships with legal firms, government and parastatal corporations.

Once the necessary legal framework is in place, we can move on to introduce this much desired reform of thelaw course.

Other important initiatives which have taken place in the law course were the introduction of English and Maltese as compulsory advanced levels for entry into the course (since October 2015), a four-year Bachelor of Laws (Honours) degree as a first cycle degree and a one-year Masters in Advocacy or in Notarial Studies as a second cycle degree, thereby bringing the Faculty of Laws in line with the Bologna process, more harmonisation in the Faculty’s procedures with those of the University of Malta and the introduction of new courses tailor made for our clients such as the evening Diploma in the Laws of Procedure requested by the Courts of Justice and the Master of Arts in Mediation requested by the Malta Mediation Centre.

Currently we are discussing the formulation of a compulsory foundation course in legal languages so as to ensure that future members of the legal profession are well versed in Italian and French.

This is because the main tool that a member of the legal profession uses in his or her daily practice is languageand students reading law do not possess at MATSEC level the necessary competence in these languages.

By providing more of a skills-oriented education coupled with a solid grounding in legal theory and legal languages, we hope that the new graduates from the Faculty of Laws will be better equipped to offer their professional services to their clients, both locally and abroad.

We are also finalising plans for an evening course in Migration Law and Society (the target being October 2018) and, in collaboration with the University’s Cottonera Resource Centre and the Chamber of Advocates have been offering a student-operated legal clinic to the members of the Cottonera community under the supervision of David E. Zammit, senior lecturer and head of Department of Civil Law.

Kevin Aquilina is the Dean of the Faculty of Laws at the University of Malta.