GRADUATE RESEARCH SEMINARS: THEORY OR PRAXIS? TERRY CARNEY* There seems to us to be an obligation on law schools to ensure that research students, whether they be PhD, LLM by thesis or LLM by coursework, are instructed in [research techniques]. 1 INTRODUCTION Australian legal education has not devoted much attention to settling the form and content of post-graduate programs. Indeed, the very idea of a separate identity for post-graduate training is something of an oxymoron in Australia. Postgraduate degree programs were slow to develop in Australian legal education. They made their presence felt only in the mid 1970s, as masters by coursework programs were introduced at Sydney (1965), Monash (1973), and a few other law schools. 2 In the design of these programs, little attention was given to systematic training in research methods or theory. The programs were introduced at a time of (comparative) plenty within the academy, and they built on very small scale thesis programs (LLM/Ph.D). In those schools where a decision was made to combine advanced coursework requirements with completion of a minor thesis, reliance was placed on the one-to-one supervisory setting as the transmission belt for that training. Indeed, by not requiring a minor thesis to be undertaken as part of the course-work programs, some schools effectively confined research training to full thesis programs (in 1986 Sydney dropped the thesis requirement for the pass LLM). 3 The theory underpinning all of this was that research skills were