The Historical Lawyer and the Goals of Legal Education

Abstract

Sloppy education results in misdirected graduates. We need to see legal education as a matter of shaping in adepts something that can be called caliber of intellect. It is referring to the university formation of a way of thinking and of perceiving the world that distinguishes legal studies from any other intellectual or scientific preparation. The author argues that legal education in the main must ensure that graduates are historical lawyers. There are two occupational paths open to law graduates, that of practitioners and that of scholars. The vast majority choose to be practitioners. Law adopts not only a dogmatic or comparative legal perspective, but also a historical perspective of discourse and argumentation. The users of this argumentation — and, one might say, everyone who appreciates it — are, on the strength of this fact, historical lawyers. Law is in a constant process of historical development, therefore a historical lawyer is a realist lawyer. The historical lawyer, with his awareness of the inevitable successive changes in the law, has no illusions as to the immutability of specific regulations, and is consequently more able to estimate the spectrum of such changes and what future amendments might entail. He is aware of the mistakes of the past and can thus take care to avoid them in the future — and, hopefully, help others to avoid them, too.