The Aims of Legal Education

Legal education generally has a number of theoretical and practical aims, not all of which are pursued simultaneously. One aim is to make the student familiar with legal concepts and institutions and with characteristic modes of reasoning. Like most intellectual disciplines the law has its technical concepts, frequently expressed in technical terms. All lawyers must become acquainted with the process of making law, settling disputes; they must study the structure of government and the organization of courts of law, including the system of appeals.

Another aim of legal education is the teaching of law in its social, economic, and scientific contexts. While law schools have never ignored the social context of their subject, Anglo-American legal education has always been less interdisciplinary than that of continental Europe. With the development of a scientific approach to social studies in the 20^th century, however, this is changing. Some law schools appoint economists, psychologists, or sociologists to their staffs, while others require or permit their students to take courses outside the law school as part of their work toward a degree. This awareness of the other social studies is thought to be more advanced in the United States than in Great Britain. Continental legal education tends to be highly interdisciplinary, with non-legal subjects compulsory for students taking their first degree in law.

The chief materials are the same everywhere: codes (where these exist), reports of court decisions, legislation, government and other public reports, textbooks, and articles in learned periodicals. The aim is not so much that the student should remember “the law” as that he should understand basic concepts and methods and become sufficiently familiar with a law library to carry out the necessary research on any legal problem that may come his way.

Trends in Legal Education

Modern legal education is expanding both in quantity and in scope, and university legal education has become dominant everywhere. The opportunities for university and professional education in law increased greatly after World War II. In England and Wales, for example, where before the war only the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and London produced significant numbers of law graduates, there are now more than 50 academic law departments. A particularly noteworthy development has been the increase in women law students, now consisting 30 to 40 percent of law students in most countries. The number of students admitted to law schools in the United States tripled between 1961 and 1980. After that demand for legal education began to level off and even decline.

Since the late 1960s universities in several countries have departed from the rigidity of prescribed syllabi to allow a greater range of student choice in selecting subjects. In most countries, more attention is paid to foreign legal systems, transnational law, and to comparative law. In some countries non-legal subjects have long been part of the syllabus; in others where law as a first degree specialization has comprised only law studies, there has been a tendency to include non-legal studies, joint courses in law and social sciences, or a more sociological approach to law.

Most law schools are trying to find a middle path between being mere trade schools or citadels of pure theory. The criticism is often made that these efforts result in a type of education that is not practical enough to be really useful in resolving day-to-day legal problems but not as rigorously theoretical as a truly academic discipline ought to be.