Legal education

Legal education, preparation for the practice of law. Instruction in law has been offered in universities since medieval times, but, since the advent of university-based law schools in the 18th and 19th centuries, legal education has faced the challenge of reconciling its aim of teaching law as one of the academic disciplines with its goal of preparing persons to become members of a profession. Most law schools have tried to find a middle path between being a mere trade school and being a citadel of pure theory. Unfortunately, the criticism is sometimes made that these efforts result in a type of education that is not practical enough to be genuinely useful in resolving day-to-day legal problems but yet not as rigorously theoretical as a truly academic discipline ought to be.

History

The ancient Romans had schools of rhetoric that provided training useful to someone planning a career as an advocate, but there was no systematic study of the law as such. During the 3rd century bce, Tiberius Coruncanius, the first plebeian pontifex maximus (chief of the priestly officials), gave public legal instruction, and a class of jurisprudentes (nonpriestly legal consultants) emerged. A student, in addition to reading the few law books that were available, might attach himself to a particular jurisprudens and learn the law by attending consultations and by discussing points with his master. Over the ensuing centuries a body of legal literature developed, and some jurisprudentes established themselves as regular law teachers.

In the medieval universities of Europe, including those in England, it was possible to study canon law and Roman law but not the local or customary legal system, since the latter was understood as parochial and so unworthy of university treatment. In most European countries the study of national laws at universities began in the 18th century, though the study of Swedish law at Uppsala dates from the early 17th century.

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On the continent of Europe the transition to the study of national law was facilitated by the fact that modern legal systems grew mostly from Roman law. In England, on the other hand, the national law, known as the common law, was indigenous. In medieval times education in the common law was provided for legal practitioners by the Inns of Court through reading and practical exercises. These methods fell into decline in the late 16th century, mainly because students came to rely on printed books, and after the middle of the 17th century there was virtually no organized education in English law until the introduction of apprenticeship for solicitors in 1729. The famous jurist Sir William Blackstone lectured on English law at Oxford in the 1750s, but university teaching of the common law did not develop significantly until the 19th century. In England, as on the Continent and throughout most of the rest of the world (though not in the United States), university-based legal education became an undergraduate program and remained so until quite recently. Since the late 20th and early 21st century, a number of nations have adopted the so-called U.S. model of legal education, providing university-based instruction in law as a profession rather than only as an academic discipline.

In the early years of the United States, persons hoping to enter the law sought apprenticeships in the offices of leading lawyers, a method of training that provided an acceptable avenue to the bar well into the 20th century. The Litchfield Law School, founded in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1784 by Tapping Reeve, was the first institution of its kind in the United States. Such independent schools later gave way to university-based law schools, the first of which was established at Harvard University in 1817. By the late 19th century, Harvard had put in place a number of practices that eventually came to define American legal education, including the use of the “case method” of instruction (see below Teaching), the requirement that students complete three years of training, and the use of a full-time faculty of scholars, rather than a part-time faculty of practicing lawyers as had previously been the case. As the number of law schools grew, so too did the proportion of the bar who were law school graduates. By the early 21st century the United States had more than 200 accredited law schools and the world’s largest bar, numbering more than one million members.

Law has long been a subject of serious study in some non-Western countries, as evidenced by the centrality of legal exegesis in the Islamic tradition and the inclusion of law on examinations for the civil service in China during the Song dynasty (960–1279). Modern university-based legal education, however, is generally regarded as a foreign institution, having been introduced by European colonial powers in the 19th century.

The 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.

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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.