Following the success of our ‘Reflections on Writing’ series, the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly  (NILQ) Editorial Board is delighted to announce the launch of a new companion series — ‘Reflections on Teaching’, led by Dr Paulina Wilson.

The new initiative explores the evolving landscape of legal education, highlighting innovative approaches to developing legal knowledge and professional skills among future generations of law graduates and practitioners, and showcasing responses to contemporary challenges encountered in academia and practice. The series also examines how teaching and research interact, inform and enrich each other, benefiting the wider legal community.

At the NILQ, we believe that as law academics seek to shape the future of their profession, it is essential to foster collegial dialogue about teaching as a vital component of academic life — one that complements, drives and is driven by our research and scholarship. The aim of the series is, therefore, to share experiences, innovations and reflections that contribute to our collective growth, in the present and into the future.

Further contributions to the series will appear over the coming months and will be made available on an advance open-access basis. We invite you to bookmark our page and visit the NILQ website regularly to explore new reflections as they appear.

We are pleased to inaugurate the series with Professor Paul Maharg’s article, ‘Teaching ≈ Learning ≈ Regulation’, in which he reflects on his own journey in law and offers interdisciplinary insights and valuable lessons.

In the second article in this series, Kryss Macleod, Manchester Metropolitan University, in her contribution ‘Teaching law inside complexity: immanent pedagogy and the possibility of becoming’, argues that the ‘double bind’ of teaching law – meeting external requirements while resisting their constraints – can be overcome by learning to live with contradiction and finding ‘small plots of new land’ to work in.