Title: The Center May Not Hold: Anxiety And Legal Education
Abstract: A paradox evident in legal education, at least in contemporary Australia, repeats a paradox in university education more generally. At the precise moment when careers for life seem no longer to be a reasonable expectation, students and universities are exhorted to engage in narrowly vocational and job-oriented training. Just as diminishing proportions of law graduates can anticipate careers in conventional legal practice, the pressure of the legal professions to structure the law degree as if all graduates will enter the professions increases, with the collusion of the universities. One explanation for this curious trend lies in the continuity of contemporary globalization with classical colonialism. Colonialism in its pedagogical aspect sought to reorganize the diversity of the exotic native and metropolitan workers and women into a unity organized around the English literary canon and Fitzjames Stephens' English gospel of the law. In the contemporary mass university, critical studies threatens this unifying pedagogy with black, Aboriginal, womens' and postcolonial and cultural and legal studies. Vocationalism in its new sense of specific training, in business, tourism and law, for example, has been used to displace social critique in higher education by playing popular fears that the merely intellectually fulfilled graduate is more likely to be unemployed. To combat this I argue that a legal studies as legal anthropology approach to legal education can combine critique and practical instruction by eschewing the internal point of view so important to the positivists. Legal academics, like competent anthropologists, need to know how to go on in the world of the culture they study, but they need to be free to place this in the intellectual context they find most useful. Students may make what use they find appropriate of this knowledge.
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-05-22
Language: en
Type: article
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