Law Professor and CELT Teaching Fellow Simon Wallace Awarded 2026 SSHRC Insight Development Grant
SSHRC Insight Development Grant awarded to CELT Teaching Fellow Dr. Simon Wallace and collaborators
Legal education faces a fundamental contradiction. For the past 150 years, law students have been taught using approaches that assume law is a fixed body of knowledge—a stable set of rules that students can extract and technically apply. In practice, lawyers must solve wicked problems under uncertainty: every case arrives with incomplete information, legal issues can be framed multiple ways, and each solution creates new problems.
Tackling this contradiction is Dr. Simon Wallace (Lincoln Alexander School of Law), alongside collaborators Dr. David Sandomierski (Lincoln Alexander School of Law), Dr. Lisa Landrum (Architectural Science), Dr. Lorella Di Cintio (The Creative School), Prof. John McMinn (University of Waterloo), and Prof. Marcin Kedzior (Humber Polytechnic). Awarded a 2026 SSHRC Insight Development Grant, their project titled “The Law Studio: Learning from Architectural Pedagogies to Reimagine Legal Education (external link) ” aims to transform and modernize legal education.
Taking inspiration from the studio pedagogy relied on in architecture education, Wallace and colleagues will design, build, and pilot at TMU a new type of law classroom that they call the “Law Studio:” a custom-built studio designed specifically to teach students how to engage in legal problem-solving, navigate uncertainty, and exercise creative judgement. In short, the law studio will be a space dedicated to producing lawyers better prepared for contemporary practice.
“Lawyers and architects are both required to help develop solutions for clients in conditions of uncertainty,” explains Wallace, “but too often legal education teaches students that law is something that can be consistently and simply applied. In the architectural studio, students learn how to use precedents and experience to build new responses to social problems. Instead of putting the professor at the front of the room, studios democratize the classroom and empower students by emphasizing the importance of their creativity and ability to collaborate.”
The implications of the project are far-reaching. In addition to designing, building, and piloting the studio at TMU, the project team will also collect empirical evidence on student learning through observations, surveys, and focus groups that will advance Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in law. The team also plans to create a documentary on the development process and share open-source design plans and curriculum templates for other institutions interested in adopting similar studio methods.
“As universities adapt their pedagogies in response to artificial intelligence, the studio points to one way forward for professional education,” says Wallace. “Today it matters even more that we teach students to be confident and flexible professionals. The law is always being rewritten and in the studio law students will learn the creative side of legal practice.”
As a CELT Teaching Fellow, Dr. Wallace is also currently leading scholarship on GenAI in learning and teaching at TMU. His project focuses on the development and evaluation of an open-source platform that uses generative AI, guided by instructor-defined learning objectives, to deliver structured, real-time feedback on legal writing exercises for law students.