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.
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.
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.
Teaching
Methods of legal education are constantly changing, but the requirement of a
university degree has become more or less uniform, coupled in many countries
with the need to pass a qualifying examination organized by the profession.
Apprenticeship, once a usual way of entering the profession in common-law
countries, has everywhere been increasingly displaced by university education, to
which it has now become a supplement.
University law schools tend to differ along national lines in their methods of
teaching. In the United States, following the work of Christopher Columbus
Langdell at Harvard in the latter half of the 19th century, the prevailing technique
came to be the case method, in which the student reads reported cases and other
materials collected in a casebook, and the class answers questions about them
instead of listening to a lecture by the teacher. The case method has been adopted
at some institutions in England and other common-law countries but has yet to find
broad adherence elsewhere. Even in the United States most law schools now use
seminars and lectures as well. The case method has the advantage of emphasizing
the characteristic feature of the common law—the evolution of principles from
decisions in actual cases—and thus of focusing the student’s attention on the
processes of analogy and distinction. It has the disadvantages of, first, being
relatively time-consuming in relation to the amount of knowledge of legal
principle that can be imparted and, second, concentrating on a source of law that
has become just one of many in modern statutory and regulatory legal systems.
The traditional teaching techniques in English universities have been lectures and
tutorials (or seminars).
In continental European countries the backbone of legal education is the formal
lecture. Class sizes are typically very large compared with those in the United
States and England. Attendance is frequently voluntary, and those who stay away
are usually able to secure the text of what they have missed. Seminars are given
too, particularly for specialized subjects. Similar methods are used in other
countries with large numbers of law students. In Russia, as in western Europe, the
lecture method supplemented by smaller discussion groups is typical.
Qualifications for practice
Common-law countries
In England and Wales a practicing lawyer must be either a barrister (an advocate
whose work is predominantly directed to the courtroom) or a solicitor (a general
legal adviser who deals with all kinds of legal business out of court and who may
act as an advocate in some of the lower courts).
The former are organized in four Inns of Court (Lincoln’s Inn, Inner Temple,
Middle Temple, Gray’s Inn) under the discipline of the Senate of the Inns of Court;
the latter are under the jurisdiction of the Law Society. It is not necessary to hold a
university degree to qualify for the profession of law, but such a degree (most often
in law) is usual. To become a barrister, a candidate must pass a two-part
examination in legal subjects, but university graduates may obtain partial or total
exemption from the first part, depending on their degrees. A barrister’s preparation
also includes practical courses and a period of pupilage administered under the
authority of the Senate of the Inns of Court.
A barrister may not practice at all until he has undergone six months of pupilage
in chambers and may not practice independently until he has been a pupil for a
year. Pupilage causes some difficulty, partly because of the cost but mainly
because of the increasing shortage of places in chambers. To qualify as a solicitor,
the normal course involves serving as an articled clerk (apprentice) for two years
and passing law examinations in two parts. In Scotland and Ireland (both the
republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland) there are similar requirements, though the
arrangements differ in detail.
In the United States, admission to the bar qualifies one for all types of legal
work. The only formal requirements are passing a state bar examination after
graduating from law school; in a few states the law degree alone is sufficient.
In both England and the United States, as in many other common-law
countries, becoming a judge or magistrate is a promotion (by appointment or
election) from the ranks of the bar, and there is no special training for the exercise
of judicial functions. But in some other common-law countries, especially in
Africa and Asia, a newly qualified lawyer may enter the government legal service
and find himself appointed in a short time to a junior magistracy. Even in these
countries there is generally no special training for the job of adjudicating.
Civil-law countries
In continental European countries the qualifications to practice law typically
depend on which of the various branches of the profession the university law
graduate wishes to enter. Some countries place more emphasis on apprenticeship
and others on examination. In France, for example, a legal practitioner may be an
advocate, an avoué, a notary, or a judge. Each receives a different training, but all
normally have gone through third- and fourth-year law degree courses.
The advocate (roughly corresponding to the English barrister) must pass a bar
examination and then serve as a probationary lawyer for three years, during which
he takes further course work as well as acquiring practical experience. The avoué
(something of a cross between a junior barrister and a senior solicitor) serves a
period of articled clerkship and undergoes a professional examination by practicing
lawyers. The notary (who does the noncontentious work performed in England by
a solicitor) need not be a university graduate and can be a product of a professional
school. His period of training lasts two years in a notary’s office.
He also takes a professional examination and, if successful, must wait for a
vacancy, since there is a limited number of notarial offices established by law.
