Innovative Methods in Teaching Law to Non-Law Students: A Proposed Framework for Experiential, Digital and Interdisciplinary Legal Learning

Teaching law to non-law students appears to be challenging for law lecturers. Non-law students background such as business, accounting, management, entrepreneurship and so on generally require practical legal literacy rather than traditional doctrinal competencies of normal legal students. Conventional lecture-centred approaches may be insufficient for learners who encounter unfamiliar legal terminology, judicial decisions and statutory materials without an established framework for legal reasoning. This conceptual article synthesises scholarship on constructivist, experiential and active learning together with recent work on problem-based learning, simulation, gamification, visualisation, flipped learning, authentic assessment and generative artificial intelligence in legal education. It focuses especially on the needs of non-law learners and on developments relevant to Malaysian and wider Asian higher education. The synthesis indicates that effective innovation requires more than digitising conventional instruction; it requires redesigning learning around professional context, participation, application, source verification and reflection. On that basis, the article proposes the C.L.E.A.R. Legal Learning Framework, comprising Contextualisation, Learning by Experience, Engagement and Collaboration, Application through Technology, and Reflective Legal Literacy. The framework positions legal literacy, rather than reproduction of doctrine, as the principal outcome for non-law students and treats technology as a means rather than an end. It further proposes AI legal-verification exercises in which students evaluate generated legal information against legislation, cases and other authoritative sources. The article concludes that innovative legal pedagogy is most effective when legal principles are connected with students' disciplinary knowledge, future professional decisions and critical digital literacy, while assessment rewards reasoned application rather than recall alone.

legal education, non-law students, experiential learning, legal literacy, innovative pedagogy

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