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Assessable Moots in Administrative Law: The Role of Student Feedback in Creating Cohesion

Teaching any law subject is inevitably a struggle to reconcile theory with practice, but administrative law offers its own particular challenges in this regard. Despite its potentially rich subject matter and its ability to intersect with other areas of law, a lack of perceptible cohesion and a ‘disconnect’ with the ‘real world’ continues to vex students and teachers of administrative law alike. Understanding how merits review, judicial review and other accountability mechanisms ‘fit together’, and how they interact with the various judicial and quasi-judicial institutions as well as primary and delegated legislation and government policy, can be a herculean task. Students often find connecting the theory and principles of administrative law with ‘real life’ legal and social situations confounding, which is exacerbated by the fact that administrative law does not deal with one cohesive subject matter or legislative scheme but crosses a variety of subject matters, the only unifying factor being government regulation. Further, principles of judicial review and the framework for merits and judicial review can prove conceptually challenging and students can find the material dry and uninteresting. Whilst this affliction is by no means unique to administrative law, when combined with issues of cohesion and disconnect, administrative law presents distinct pedagogical challenges for its teachers. 

The challenges that administrative law poses for its teachers and learners have not been overlooked in legal education scholarship. Common to this research is recognition of the need to ‘contextualise’ administrative law, or place it in the ‘real world’. Methods suggested include the use of topical issues that can help place administrative law in a historical, political and socio-economic context, express incorporation of indigenous content, investigation of the work of citizen advocate services and the utilisation of clients through clinical legal education. Might mooting, a rite of passage for all law students, help students contextualise administrative law through an understanding of how a matter proceeds through the levels of review? Could mooting help create the elusive connection between theory and practice? This paper reports upon on a three-year pilot of an assessable moot that was introduced into the subject Administrative Law at the University of Wollongong in 2016. Structured student feedback provides an insight into the pedagogical and administrative challenges and successes of assessable moots in promoting a skills-based, student-centred learning experience that encourages the development of advocacy skills and substantive knowledge that may be transferred to professional practice.