The Politics of Legal Education

The chapter unpacks the politics of nexus between legal education, legal practice and legal research. We start by problematising some common assumptions and subsequently lay out contemporary challenges to legal education and academia. We argue that we need to abandon all reflexes associating national=doctrinal=useful for legal practice and hence legal education, and international=non-doctrinal=useless for lawyers and hence legal education. First, legal education has to be conscious of the complexity of inter-connected, and ever-changing, laws, regulations and governance structures in the contemporary world. Second, it needs to be built on pluralist research agendas, that draw on doctrinal and non-doctrinal scholarship, with both national and global perspectives in mind. Finally, legal education for the 21st century has to be accountable to a broader set of actors than it has been the case thus far: it needs a more inclusive concept of ‘legal practice’.