5.1.3 Theoretical Foundations of Legal Education

Why is law taught the way it is taught? Four great traditions supply the theory: 1. Law as a science — the case method (Christopher Columbus Langdell, Harvard, 1870s). Law is a science; its primary materials are cases and statutes; the student learns by inductive study of appellate decisions, grilled by Socratic questioning. Strength: rigorous reasoning. Weakness: appellate cases distort the real world; students learn doctrine, not clients. 2. Law as a practical craft — the apprenticeship/clinical model (American legal realists — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Karl Llewellyn, Jerome Frank). Law is what officials and lawyers do; education must therefore include doing — drafting files, interviewing clients, appearing in court. This is the root of clinical legal education, where students handle real matters under supervision (legal-aid clinics, externships) — the ancestor of TU's Clinical Law I– III, Moot Court I–II and Conveyancing courses. 3. Law as social engineering — the interdisciplinary model (Roscoe Pound; sociological jurisprudence). Law cannot be understood apart from society; hence economics, sociology, political science and history belong in the law curriculum — precisely why your first semester contains Sociology, Political Theory, Economics and History. 4. Law as justice — the critical and ethical model (critical legal studies, clinical movement, human-rights education). Legal education must train not only skilled technicians but conscientious professionals: critics of injustice, servants of…