As law graduates wield significant influence in public life, law schools’ responsibility for cultivating students’ civic capacities and dispositions remains an important but often neglected project. Taking up this project, this article traces a thread of deliberative democratic aspirations within legal education scholarship and explores the potential of participation within law schools’ own political processes for realising these ideals. To do so, it examines law students’ experiences of an experiment with deliberative democracy’s leading institutional innovation – the deliberative mini-public – and demonstrates the ways in which participation fostered deliberative capacities, a more collective orientation, and increased confidence. Ultimately, the article illustrates the mutually reinforcing nature of civic and legal education, affirms law schools’ broader role within society and offers both theoretical and practical insights into the place of democratic innovation within the law school.

A ‘deliberative wave’, with increasing uses of deliberative citizen forums, is sweeping the globe. Whereas deliberative citizen forum enthusiasts claim that they represent appropriate tools to reconnect citizens with politics and demand a stronger empowerment of deliberative citizen forums, critics argue that they will reduce rather than increase democratic legitimacy. This letter sheds new light on the roles of deliberative citizen forums in democratic systems, with a particular eye on disaffected citizens. Drawing on a conjoint experiment with a representative sample of non-participating German citizens, it shows that citizens in general challenge notions of the strong empowerment of deliberative citizen forums. They prefer deliberative citizen forums that are limited to policy advice, collaborate with legacy institutions and include extra provisions (such as a large size or clear majorities). By contrast, disaffected citizens are more open to the empowerment and decoupling of deliberative citizen forums compared to allegiant citizens, but this not imply that they are generally in clear favour of such design features (in fact, they are mostly indifferent via-à-vis empowerment and decoupling). These findings have important ramifications for democratic designs.

How much public and elite support is there for the use of a citizens’ assembly – a random selection of citizens brought together to consider a policy issue – to tackle major, deadlock-inducing disagreements in deeply divided places with consociational political institutions? We focus on Northern Ireland and use evidence from a cross-sectional attitude survey, a survey-based experiment and elite interviews. We find that the general public support decision-making by a citizens’ assembly, even when the decision reached is one they personally disagree with. However, support is lower among those with strong ideological views. We also find that elected politicians oppose delegating decision-making power to an ‘undemocratic’ citizens’ assembly, but are more supportive of recommendation-making power. These findings highlight the potential for post-conflict consociations to be amended, with the consent of the parties, to include citizens’ assemblies that make recommendations but not binding policy.

This article argues for the assessment of deliberative mini-publics as a dynamic part of a wider deliberative system. The approach draws primarily on Dryzek’s (2009) deliberative capacity building framework, which describes the democratic process as ideally involving authentic deliberation, inclusiveness in the deliberative process, and consequentiality or deliberation’s influence on decisions as well as positive impact on the system. This approach is illustrated using the comparative assessment of two mini-public case studies: the Australian Citizens’ Parliament and Italy’s Iniziativa di Revisione Civica (Civic Revision Initiative). The application of deliberative capacity as a standard for evaluating mini-publics in systemic terms reveals differences between the cases. The deliberative capacity of both cases overlap, but they do so for different reasons that stem from the interconnections between their specific designs and other components of the deliberative system.

This article analyzes whether democratic deliberation enhances ‘civic virtues’ such as political knowledge, efficacy, trust, and preparedness for political and other collective action. The empirical analysis is based on an experiment held in November 2006 in Finland. The topic of this citizen deliberation experiment was nuclear power. Two treatments were enforced; half of the small groups made a decision through secret ballot, whereas the other half formulated a common statement. Even though both treatments were designed to be ‘deliberative’ with discussion rules and moderators, the common statement procedure was expected to lead to more thorough deliberation. Therefore, we anticipate more increase in civic virtues in the common statement treatment. Based on the empirical analyses, this expectation is partially confirmed. Most notably, the participants’ knowledge of energy-related issues increased more in the common statement treatment, but also the increase of political trust and readiness for collective action shows a similar pattern. Finally, deliberation did not increase the participants’ overall preparedness to act politically, but did not decrease it either.