According to commentary around the Priestley 11, the core mandated subjects of the accredited Australian law degree are either a dead hand, or a ‘surprisingly light hand’. Despite a current overhaul, the Priestleys look like retaining their substance and scope into the foreseeable future. So ingrained is the textbook tradition of the law, that for many in the academy, the profession, and the judiciary, it is difficult to imagine a ‘coherent body of discipline knowledge’ of the law in any other way. The approach to teaching the Priestleys is somewhat aided by the less prescriptive Threshold Learning Outcomes for law (‘TLOs’), yet, we posit, the TLOs exist in the shadow of the Priestleys and presuppositions of what it means to be a lawyer. Importantly, it is the accrediting body at the apex of power in the legal system, that determines the substantive meaning of ‘lawyer’ through its prescription of what is taught in the accredited degree—a meaning that is increasingly questioned in the professional literature across common law jurisdictions.

Amidst the unbundling, globalisation, and ‘technologization’ of legal services we ask: ‘what is a lawyer in the 21st century?’ as seen through the lens of the mandated curriculum. We seek to answer this question by subverting the power inherent in curriculum decisions, instead crowd-sourcing curriculum possibilities from amongst gathered legal experts.

In this hands-on session, participants are invited to re-imagine the core components of the accredited law degree. This facilitated process aims to determine what it means to be a graduate lawyer in the face of rapid and paradigmatic social, economic, environmental, political and technological change, through collaborative articulation of a re-imagined core curriculum.