AIMS OF LEGAL EDUCATION

AIMS OF LEGAL EDUCATION

Legal education generally has a number of theoretical and practical aims, not all of which are pursued simultaneously. The emphasis placed on various objectives differs from period to period, place to place, and even teacher to teacher. One aim is to make the student familiar with legal concepts and institutions and with characteristic modes of legal reasoning. Students also become acquainted with the processes of making law, settling disputes, and regulating the legal profession, and they must study the structure of government and the organization of courts of law, including the system of appeals and other adjudicating bodies.

Another aim of legal education is the understanding of law in its social, economic, political, and scientific contexts. Prior to the late 20th century, Anglo-American legal education was less interdisciplinary than that of continental Europe. With the development of a more or less scientific approach to social studies since the late 20th century, however, this has been changing. Some American law schools appoint economists, historians, political scientists, or sociologists to their staffs, while most permit their students to take courses outside the law school as part of their work toward a degree. Continental legal education tends to be highly interdisciplinary, if more abstract and doctrinal than its American counterpart, with nonlegal subjects compulsory for students taking their first degree in law.

Traditionally, legal education has included the study of legal history, which was once regarded as an essential part of any educated lawyer's training. Although economics is increasingly popular as a tool for understanding law, much legal history is nonetheless taught in the context of the general law curriculum. Since the corpus of the law is a constantly evolving collection of rules and principles, many teachers consider it necessary to trace the development of the branch of law they are discussing. In civil-law countries, where most parts of the law are codified, it is not generally thought necessary to cover topics that antedate the codes themselves. On the other hand, in countries that have a common-law system, knowledge of the law has traditionally depended to a great extent on the study of the court decisions and statutes out of which common law evolved.

Even in jurisdictions that require four or five years of law study (as in Japan and India), the graduating law student is not expected to have studied the whole body of substantive law but is, however, typically expected to be familiar with the general principles of the main branches of law. To this end, certain subjects are regarded as basic: constitutional law, governing the major organs of state; the law of contract, governing obligations entered into by agreement; the law of tort (or delict in civil-law systems), governing compensation for personal injury and damage to property, income, or reputation; the law of real (or immovable) property (see property law), governing transactions with land; criminal law, governing punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation, and prevention of offenses against the public order; and corporation (or company) law, governing the leading form that economic actors take in modern society. The materials studied are largely the same everywhere: codes (where these exist), reports of court decisions, legislation, government and other public reports, institutional books (in civil-law countries), textbooks, and articles in learned periodicals. The aim is not so much that the students should remember “the law” as that they should understand basic concepts and methods and become sufficiently familiar with a law library to carry out the necessary research on any legal problems that may come their way.