Legal Education Under Fire

Abstract

Abstract: Legal education has come under fire from all quarters, almost everywhere in the world. The crisis of legal education is not only an internal problem for universities and university scholarship, but also deeply affects public policies and the shaping of legal order. The main features of legal education that have shaped the major legal systems of the European area, but that are now experiencing a process of obsolescence are: the influence of Roman law, both directly and through the Pandectists; legal positivism, formalism and value-free scholarship, dogmatics and constructionism; the separation of the study and teaching of law from the study and teaching of history and of social sciences; the idea that law is a product of the State exclusively. To overcome these deficiencies, one should tear down the barriers between the fields, introduce new paradigms, a new grammar founded on the entire body of the law – not only on the field of civil law; open up the study and teaching of law to social sciences and history; place the study of transnational institutions and legal cultures alongside the study of local legal cultures, because legal science transcends national boundaries; reestablish links with public and private policies.