| Special Workshop Title: | Law Scholarship and Law Teaching: Technical or Theoretical? |
| Author: | John Bell, University of Cambridge |
| Paper Title: | Legal theory in legal education - “Anything you can do, I can do meta…” |
| Abstract: |
In a world of knowledge explosion, legal education is not about the transmission of information, but about the development of intellectual skills - analysis, synthesis and critical evaluation. The purpose of education is to enable learners to participate in the transformation and development of the law, either in practice or as knowledgeable critics. As individuals, they need to be come reflective practitioners, aware of what they do and able to improve through reflection. Such intellectual skills involve the learner in adopting a critical distance to the current legal rules and practices, and this requires theory. The study of all legal subjects need to be informed by theory and the perspectives of non-legal disciplines. Legal theory and legal philosophy offer meta-approaches to the current law, examining the purposes, epistemology and methods of legal study. The theory of legal subjects needs to go beyond systematics - establishing internal coherence to ideas and values. It needs to enable the learner to go beyond the present, to un-learn established views and to develop new perspectives. Part of the this process of new learning is to understand what lies behind the existing practices and rules. This legal theory provides in terms of analysis of forms of justification and argumentation within law. Legal philosophy provides perspectives from which there is a challenge to invent new visions of what the law is for and how different audiences can be included within legal justification. Such thinking is necessarily abstract - abstracted from the practice of law. For most students, it is necessary to engage with their concrete aspirations by mediated forms of legal theory - legal theory tied to practical issues. This demands more of the legal educator, since she must be conversant with the legal theory, but able to translate legal theory debates into concrete issues. To reach the mass of law students, our educational legal theory writing has to be both theoretically ambitious and concretely situated in the practice of ordinary legal subjects. |
This page was last updated on: 2003-05-04.