http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~nlawwww/articles5/torrem5.html
[1995] 5 Web JCLI  Words 2844
Legal Education in Flanders

Leo F.T. Torremans
Pedagogical Advisor Higher Education
ARGO, Belgium
and
Paul L.C Torremans
Lecturer in Law
The University of Leicester

Copyright  1995 Leo and Paul Torremans. 
First Published in Web Journal of Current Legal Issues in association with Blackstone Press Ltd.

Summary
This article describes the system of legal education in Flanders. It subjects both the curriculum and methods of teaching and assessment to critical review and highlights a number of areas where there is room for improvement.

Contents
Organisation of the law degree 
Candidate in law 
Licentiate in law 
Analysis and comments 
Assessment 
Postgraduate degrees 
Pedagogical organisation and comments 
An introduction for students
Individual guidance for students 
Student texts 
Exercises and assessment training 
Interaction between courses and internal quality control 
Conclusion
Bibliography  

Organisation of the law degree
A successful student will receive his or her law degree ("licentiaat in de rechten") at the end of five years of study at university. In theory these five years are divided in two parts: 

- the student becomes candidate in law after two years, and
- licentiate in law after three more years of study.

The structure of the degree is fairly similar in all universities, which should not come as a surprise because the content of the degree is derived from a fairly detailed Royal Decree which outlines which courses need to be taken before a law degree can be awarded.

Candidate in law
Most students take the following courses in their first year. 

1.	Supporting courses: philosophy, psychology, sociology, economics and Belgian political and social history. This first group of courses helps the student to understand the social and economic reality on which the legal system is based and which forms the environment in which the legal system operates.
2.	Introduction to law courses: Roman law, history of public la and sources and principles of law.
3.	Language course: French (primarily legal aspects).  

Some universities offer a slightly different programme, but in reality all comes down to a different distribution of courses over the first three years. Courses which are left out in one year are added to the programme of another year and vice versa.

The same combination is found in the second year, but the law courses start dealing with modern law too. 

1.	Further supporting courses are: Epistemology, logic and ethics and natural law.
2.	Law courses are: history of private law, legal texts in French, German and English, constitutional law, contract and tort and an introduction to comparative law. 
3.	Language courses: English or German (primarily legal aspects) and legal terminology in Dutch. 

These courses are commonly on the menu. Most students are also asked to choose one or two optional courses and criminology and further social science courses figure prominently on the lists of options. 

All courses in the first and second year consist of a series of weekly lectures, though most universities do organise some tutorials. The lectures take up approximately 500 hours per year, while one to two hours of tutorials per week is probably a good average. Those tutorials focus on the legal aspects, especially in the second year. Language courses are often taught in small groups.

Licentiate in law
In the third year students most students have to take the following courses: family law, special contracts, penal law, labour law, procedural law, commercial law, property law, legal anthropology, business economics and accountancy. 

The fourth and fifth year consist firstly out of a series of obligatory courses. These are administrative law, patrimonial aspects of family law, penal procedure, company law, international law, conflict of laws, EC law, tax law, social security law and legal warranties, securities and guarantees. 

To that a list of optional courses is added. The list of optional courses contains reflection courses, comparative courses, in depth study courses and specialist option courses. In the final year students need to choose at least one reflection course, such as sociology of law or jurisprudence. They also need to choose at least one comparative course, such as comparative company law, comparative penal law, etc. Apart from that they are basically free to choose any course out of a long list of options amongst which in depth study courses (business law, EC law, labour law, intellectual property, etc) figure prominently together with specialised options such as law and medicine, computer law and African law. 

One university allows its students to choose five obligatory courses and five optional courses per year, but most other universities still stick to the old system which put most of the obligatory courses in the fourth year and the optional courses in the fifth year. Most students use the optional courses to specialise in one or two areas of law and some universities encourage this by restricting the choice of the students to groups of options available under headings such as civil law, public law, business law, social law and penal law.

Lectures remain the normal way in which courses are taught in years three to five, but students often choose two courses per year in which they take tutorials (approx. two hours every fortnight). Sometimes these tutorials are replaced by seminars. The lectures take up approximately 400 hours per year.

All law schools have concluded Erasmus style agreements and allow that a number of courses at home is replaced by a number of courses taken abroad. These exchanges take place inside the five year program if the precise plan of study is agreed with the home law school.

Analysis and comments
Three aspects are found inside the structure of the law degree. Students are first of all required to acquire an introductory knowledge about a number of areas to which law and its operation are closely related. This knowledge should be at university level. Business lawyers cannot function optimally without a sound knowledge of principles of economics, business economics and accountancy, while lawyers who deal with penal law will benefit from an advanced level of knowledge in areas such as sociology and psychology. 

This is of course followed by the substantive law courses, which cover all areas of law. All round knowledge is clearly an important value in this system which does not follow the tendency towards the training of specialist lawyer in one or two areas. It adheres to the theory that one can only specialise in one area if one is able to compare problems and solutions with those in other areas in a comparative way. Specialisation, the third aspect of the degree, can come afterwards.

Indeed in the final stages of the degree students are asked to specialise in a couple of areas and to acquire a detailed knowledge of the law in these areas. This level can easily be compared to that acquired in certain Anglo-Saxon lectured LLM programs. 

In an increasingly European and even global legal environment languages have become essential. This explains the additional presence of language courses inside the degree structure used by most universities. It is therefor not under discussion that legal terminology in French, German and English and the interpretation of legal texts in these languages are part of the program. But two points of view are around in relation to the level of general knowledge of these three languages. One university takes the view that students should have some knowledge of these languages and leaves it to them to supplement their degree with languages courses, should their language knowledge be inadequate, while the other universities have incorporated some language courses into the program. It must be said though that the latter courses focus on legal terminology.

Much could be said about the heavy reliance on lectures, but this should be seen against the background of the entry requirements that Flemish universities are allowed to operate. Every student who has obtained a official certificate of higher secondary studies (roughly comparable with GCSE followed by A-levels) can study law at a law faculty of his or her choice and the maximum registration fee is approximately £400 per year. High student numbers are an inevitable consequences and make it almost impossible to introduce more tutorials. This is especially so because law is a popular subject and one which is often taken by students who want to keep open a broader spectrum of career options.

Assessment 
Originally all university exams were oral exams, but due to the pressure of the high student numbers a number of written examinations have been introduced in the first and second year of the degree in recent years. There are two exam periods, one in June-July and a resit exam period in September. Another consequence of the liberal admissions policy is that the pass rate in the first year is regularly no higher than 50 per cent. In the other years September resits and students who retake a whole year are by no means an exceptional phenomenon. The latter group of students does not have to retake certain exams for which they obtained good marks if their overall result reached a minimum threshold though.

Postgraduate degrees 
Several postgraduate degrees are well established, such as the notary law degree ("licentiaat in het notariaat", required for notarissen/notaires), the law teaching degree ("geaggregeerde voor het HSO in de rechten") and the PhD ("doctoraat"). In recent years further postgraduate programmes have been established in areas such as tax law and European law. Some of these programmes which are generally called special licences or LLM, as they would indeed be called in the UK, are also general in nature.

Pedagogical organisation and comments 
An introduction for students
A general introduction on how to study law at university should also be made available. This could contain details about time tables, the organisation of tutorials, university procedures, study-methods, how to use the library and computer facilities etc. Some but not all of this information is nowadays found in the university prospectus, but this is not a tool which students are encouraged to use.

Individual guidance for students
The English personal tutor system is not in use in any of the Flemish universities. In the first year some structures exist though to offer the students some advice and assistance. Some universities call this the "monitoraat" - system. This means that some tutorials are put on, as described above and students can ask their monitors questions concerning the courses during the tutorials. Other universities appoint a year head who is the obvious person to contact when something goes wrong. But overall students are very much out there on their own, when these minimalist solutions are compared to the personal tutor system.

It is submitted that there is room for improvement in this area. All students should be assigned a personal tutor and this should not only happen in the first year, but also in years two to five. The social role of the personal tutor should be introduced. This role cannot be fulfilled by the university counselling and health service because students with minor problems will not make their way to this service which deals in their view only with students who have a major problem. Those students with a major problem might on the other hand not find their way to this service without the help of a personal tutor and a personal tutor can improve the efficiency of the system by sending the student immediately to the right address or person inside the service. This is not unrelated to the study aspect, as social problems often result in study problems. Obviously while the social function of the personal tutor can reduce the number of cases in which study problems arise, some of these study problems will inevitably arise and the personal tutor will then have to deal with them. This could be done through a system of functioning talks. The personal tutor should see his or her personal students once every six weeks to discuss their situation. Problems with specific courses, study methodology and approach problems, problems of a social or personal nature and the student's motivation are all topics for that discussion and the tutor and the student should agree in the end on a brief conclusion which could contain a programme for further action and eventually some advise from the tutor. Apart from that the personal tutor should make him- or herself available at least twice a week for those students who want to see their tutor urgently.

Student texts
A student text should be made available for each course. This can be a textbook or a text or bundle that is especially prepared for the course, but it should cover all aspects of the topic which are taught. The vast majority of courses taught in Flemish law schools complies with this requirement. Ideally these texts should not only contain a table of contents though. They should also contain detailed aims and objectives in each chapter. This allows students to know precisely what is expected of them and to study efficiently. The clearly structured text should be supplemented with footnote references for further study and at the end of each larger part of the course exercises should be added. The latter will allow the student to evaluate on an individual basis whether he or she meets the aims and objectives which were set out.

Exercises and assessment training
Most Flemish law faculties have started to organise mock exams in the middle of the first year. Students can get familiar with university exams and test their knowledge at that stage. It is submitted that further improvements can be made in this area through the introduction of exercises in each course. To this end lectures should be interrupted for one or two seminars when a larger part of the course has been dealt with, or approximately once every six weeks. These exercises need to be prepared by the students and should test their knowledge in the area taught immediately beforehand and to evaluate whether they meet the aims and objectives. The preparation should involve independent library research to widen the student's sources of materials and to teach them independent research skills, which are often left underdeveloped due to the dominance of lectures in the existing model. These exercises can be modelled on the English tutorial exercises and they should complement the exercises in the student texts. Students who experience problems at this stage can either remedy them themselves or can seek assistance from their subject tutor or from their personal tutor. In any case this system should detect problems at an early stage, avoid their aggravation and allow for these problems to be solved as soon as possible.

Interaction between courses and internal quality control
Most courses in Flanders are taught by one professor and stand in isolation. Relationships with other courses and combinations and co-operation between courses are rather underdeveloped. Overlaps between courses etc can follow. This should be improved as part of a scheme of internal quality control which each faculty should organise. All members of the faculty share responsibility for and take part in this quality control exercise. In this context the scheme could check whether all courses are kept up to date, whether the structure of the degree is still in line with the evolution of the legal science and the legal profession, whether new courses need to be introduced, whether the quality of teaching and the level of the courses are adequate, whether new equipment is required etc. Such a system permits all members of the faculty to assess all aspects of teaching in the faculty. This pre-supposes that each professor should also organise a system of self-assessment. Student questionnaires and alumni questionnaires can assist this process of quality control because they add to the information which can be of use during the exercise. 

Conclusion
In conclusion it can be said that the universities offer a tough, but thorough programme. Originally not a lot of attention was paid to the special educational needs of the individual student. Improvements were made in this area in recent years and we hope that this article offers some useful further suggestions. Some professors are reluctant to go down this road any further and emphasise that they are first of all researchers. We cannot accept that argument. Research and teaching should be equally important also as far as the distribution of time is concerned and good university teaching and research can only improve each others level.

Bibliography
Prospectus K U Leuven (Catholic University, Leuven) 1995-1996.
Prospectus Universiteit Antwerpen (Antwerp University) 1995-1996.
Prospectus Universiteit Gent (Ghent University) 1995-1996.
Prospectus V U Brussel (Free University, Brussels) 1995-1996.
Block, J H, Efthim, H E and Burns, R B (1988) Building Effective Mastery Learning Schools (New York: Macmillan).
Bloom, B (1987) 'A response to Slavin's Mastery Learning Theory Reconsidered' 57 Review of Educational Research, No 4, 507-508.
Dyck, W (1990) 'The Role of Students' Formative Criterion Referenced Self-Assessment in a Mastery Learning Project', Report for the American Educational Research Association (Boston: American Educational Research Association).
Dyck, W and Vermandel, A (eds) 'Formatieve Zelfevaluatie', special issue (1994) 46 Tijdschrift voor opvoeding en onderwijs.