The law assessment takes the form of an eight hundred word essay on the differences between legal education in England and Wales and in Russia. Students are told that they are to obtain their information partly from textbooks and partly from the answers given to them in the peer-to-peer information exchange. These students will be referred to throughout the paper as the Russian students.
Jane’s students Jane's group consisted of 30 undergraduates from the School of Law taking an optional module, Soviet and PostSoviet Legal Systems. The module runs during the two teaching semesters of one academic year, and for the students is one of four modules which they study that year. The majority of the students are in their second or third year of an LLB (the module is one of a number of options open to both year groups). A handful of students are second-year students on the LLB English Law with French law degree course, whereby they spend two years in London and two years in Paris to get a joint qualification. A few of the students are taking a Diploma in Legal Studies over one year, before returning to a home institution in Europe; one of the Law School’s partner institutions as part of a Socrates project which allows law students to spend a year abroad. The students in the seminar are therefore a heterogeneous group, but united by the fact that they have already spent a least one year studying law full-time, and will have at least another year or two of such study. For simplicity, in the following account they will be referred to as the English law students, as despite their range of ethnicity and nationality, it is English law they are currently studying.
The Student Interactions The English law students first met the Autumn Term Russian students at a social gathering. Thanks to the generosity of the English Language Centre, the English law students were brought to meet the Russians for an informal sandwich lunch on 19 October. The timing of the weekly seminar for the English students of Russian law happened to be 12 until 2pm on a Friday, and it was comparatively simple for the seminar leader to condense the work covered in the class that week into one hour, allowing the second hour of the timetabled period to be spent on icebreaking social interaction between the two groups of students. This was luxury not available to the Spring Term Russian students. It was only after this social lunch meeting, having observed how well the students got on with each other, that the scheme began to be hatched to bring them together in a more pedagogical setting. Mutual diary coordination between the teachers, and consideration of the topics to be studied by the English law students, resulted in time being set aside in the seminar on 9 November for the students to compare notes about legal education in their respective jurisdictions. In preparation for the meeting, the English law students were given a handout explaining that they were being set a piece of written work (one of two formative pieces to be completed that semester) based on the information that they would obtain from the Russian students. The copy of this handout can be found in Appendix B. There was list of suggested questions, based on the teacher’s knowledge of Russian legal education and geared to bringing out contrasts between the Russian and English systems of legal education. The Russian students were also given a list of suggested questions, see Appendix A. With full attendance, the English law student group comprised 30 students, whilst there were 15 Russian students. The teachers decided that the students should be arranged into groups of four English law students to two Russian students. There were a couple of reasons for this. It was felt that having just one Russian informant for any subgroup of English law students would risk misinformation, whereas having two for any subgroup would allow a simple measure of quality control on the information being given by the Russians. This then determined mathematically that the number of English law students would be four to each subgroup, which conveniently allowed the teacher to ensure that there were at least one or two students in every group who had been brought up within English legal system and would therefore have a cultural knowledge about it. This was done by getting the students to sort themselves out into subgroups of four before the Russians arrived, making sure that there were at least two "locals" in each group. All the English law students had been warned that they would be asked about English legal education, and as all were partaking of some aspect of that education, even if only for a year, it did not seem unreasonable that they should know something about it. The session worked excellently. It may have been very helpful that the students had already met each other; at least one of the English law students’ subgroups asked for specific Russian students by name. The English law students formed their subgroups and spread themselves about the room, and Russians in pairs joined them.
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