What Is the Meaning of Legal Expertise

We examined the development of legal expertise in a large sample of advanced law students over a period of approximately 1 year, during which they practiced solving complex legal cases in written mock exams in addition to general studies. We notice that their performance increases monotonically with the number of mock exams they take. The performance test curve has a smooth, slightly concave shape with no wrinkles. If we consider the time elapsed since the first examination in the respective area of law, the evolution is much less fluid and shows a sharp and significant decline in week 8: performance returns almost to the initial level. After that, performance quickly returns to pre-decline levels. This effect appears to be motivated by a motivational effect: it decreases when the weather is bad in the days leading up to the exam, i.e. when grey skies make external learning opportunities less attractive. However, we cannot exclude that the effect is partly due to cognitive restructuring. In summary, it can be assumed that exam scores reliably measure students` performance at a critical stage of their studies, where they are trained to apply legal rules to hypothetical but realistic cases.

Reviews are assigned to participants often and essentially randomly enough to allow reliable analysis of performance change using panel data methods. Marchant, G., & Robinson, J. (1999). Is it enough to know the tax legislation to be a tax specialist? on the development of legal expertise. In R. J. Sternberg & J. S. Horvath (Eds.), Tacit knowledge in professional practice: researcher and practitioner perspectives (pp.

3-20). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. In a comprehensive empirical study (N = 71,405), we analyzed the development of legal expertise during a critical 1-year phase of university legal education where advanced law students begin to solve complex cases. We were particularly interested in the functional shape of the learning curve and inter-individual differences in learning. Performance increases monotonically with the number of practical exams after a slightly concave learning curve without significant folds. However, if you look at how performance changes over time, the curve is not monotonous and shows intermediate performance declines. We provide evidence to suggest that these declines are due to cyclical declines in motivation. There are roughly equal marginal effects between the exercise of legal reviews in general and the exercise of examinations in the specific area of law.

Students with high initial achievement (compared to low performance) benefit more from taking exams in a particular area of law, while students with low initial achievement benefit more from exams in general. The increase in concave performance with the number of practical exams is mainly due to people with low initial performance. Those with high initial performance mainly show a tendency towards linear learning. We discuss the practical implications of these findings for academic legal education. Glöckner, A. and Ebert, I. D. (2011). Legal intuition and expertise. In M.

Sinclair (ed.), Handbook of Intuition Research (pp. 157-167). Northampton: Edward Elgar. Blasi, G. L. (1995). What lawyers know – legal expertise, cognitive science and the function of theory. Journal of Legal Education, 45, 313-397. Englich, B. and Soder, K. (2009). Moody experts: How mood and expertise influence judgment anchoring.

Judgment and Decision Making, 4, 41-50. Marchant, G., Robinson, J., Anderson, U., & Schadewald, M. (1991). Analog transfer and expertise in legal thinking. Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, 48, 272-290. In addition to a more differentiated perspective on skills development in general and in the field of legal expertise in particular (an area largely unexplored so far), the current results also fit into the work on the effects of testing (for a recent review, see Roediger et al. 2011) by providing an analysis of the functional form of the effect of commonly used aptitude tests. It is interesting to note that the observed effects of the repeated general and specific examinations (“audit”, so to speak”) presented in Table 4 remain stable and significant, even taking into account the time elapsed since the first examination in the respective area of law, which is an approximation of the (intensive) period of study in the respective area of law.

Footnote 8 In other words, the results presented in this article on the effects of examinations also apply to (approximate) control of learning time. Therefore, the results may be influenced, at least in part, by the effects of testing in addition to the simple effects of materials examination. The strong impact of domain-specific and general practice-specific examinations could, for example, be plausibly explained by the fact that tests lead to better knowledge organisation and tests improve knowledge transfer in new contexts (Roediger et al. 2011). The positive interaction of the practice of examination specific to a legal field with the first results could also be explained by the fact that the benefits in structuring knowledge for those who start with good basic knowledge in the area of law concerned could be particularly high. Nevertheless, thanks to further research, it is possible to investigate in more detail the relationships between the effects of testing and the development of know-how. The results of state examinations are, by and large, the only signals taken into account in the labour market. Although the results obtained through the university examinations are a prerequisite for enrollment in the first state examination, they are not included in the results of the state examination and therefore play only a secondary role in assessing student performance. The state exam can be taken twice. After two failures, the entire legal study ends without a degree and is therefore worthless. Therefore, preparation for the state exam plays an extremely important role.

The preparation time for the first state exam is not limited, although it usually takes about 1 year. Footnote 2 Dickert, S., Herbig, B., Glöckner, A., Gansen, C., & Portack, R. (2012). The more, the better? – Impact of training, experience and information in court decisions. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26, 223-233. The German legal education system consists of two stages. First, students enter the Faculty of Law for theoretical and doctrinal training in law. The study of law covers a period of 4 to 6 years, culminating in the “First State Examination in Law”, organized by the Ministry of Justice of the country concerned and passed by the courts of appeal.

Footnote 1 After the first state examination, successful candidates may begin a 2-year internship in a state-paid legal internship phase with positions in a court. a public prosecutor`s office, in the public administration and in a law firm. At the end of this legal internship is the second State examination, which in turn is passed by the higher regional courts. Only after passing this examination is one considered a fully qualified lawyer who can hold any position as a judge, prosecutor and lawyer or lawyer in the public administration. All legal training, including examination periods, lasts at least 7 years. Baylor, A. L. (2001). A U-shaped model to develop intuition by skill level.

New Ideas in Psychology, 19, 237-244. Glöckner, A., Towfigh, E. & Traxler, C. Development of legal expertise. Instr Sci 41, 989-1007 (2013). doi.org/10.1007/s11251-013-9266-5 However, a reasonable assumption is that performance increases linearly with experience (Fig.