Educating Men and Women for Service Through Law: Osgoode Hall Law School 1963-1988

My work... has assumed the shape of ... a spiral curriculum, circling around the same issues, though trying to keep them open-ended. This statement was penned by Northrop Frye in Spiritus Mundi in the context of reflections about creativity and literary criticism, but it aptly describes as well the intellectual ferment of writing about legal education in Canada during the past few decades. Indeed, Frye's suggestion that the above quotation "may be only a rationalization for not having budged an inch in eighteen years ' may similarly offer an important clue about the legal education debate in Canada and the regular re-occurrence of the same issues. Seen in this way, "legal education never is, it is always about to be", and the process of writing about legal education represents nothing so much as a "spiral curriculum".