#8019 - Burridge And Webb - Jurisprudence

Burridge and Webb: The Values of Common Law Legal Education: Rethinking Rules, Responsibilities, Relationships and Roles in the Law School 'Legal values'. Any doubts are multiplied by the sheer volume of material about the fissures between teaching law and learning justice. They attempt to venture into territory on the relationship between values and "liberal legal education". Argue that some of the foundational and long held aspirations for liberal education are, at best, misconceived or overlooked, or, at worst, actively undermined by common law legal education. 1. They treat values as more than social preferences, and see them as having a deeper, moral prevalence, either because they represent in themselves the articulation of some fundamental or moral principles, or are framed as secondary social principles that rest on such a primary principle. 2. Assume that values are heterogeneous and often conflicting. 3. Take it as given that "legal values" must contain within themselves an expression of underlying moral values, not least because legal value claims otherwise risk being arbitrary, subjective, and the product of bare sovereign power. 4. Not concerned with whether law has any stronger claim to truth or justice than does education, maths or medicine. They examine the ideas of Cownie and Pue. Cownie looks at the idea that law schools have to address the values inherent in their programs, faced with the problem that law teachers are not trained in techniques of human cultivation. Pue shifts the emphasis from the individual law teacher to the academy as a whole. He sees beyond the immediacy of the law school mission and echoes the idea that law school is returning to a trade school model of education. Burridge and Webb take a more positive view. They doubt the practicality or value of devising a legal education programme that further invokes liberalism. They argue that there is much more to celebrate in recent initiatives in law schools around the world to explore and address the values that are encountered in the study of law. Legal Education as Liberal Education: The mission of the liberal law school is to prepare "good citizens" or "better persons" rather than simply good lawyers. The role of the liberal law school is to develop the capacity of students to engage in rational debate about the law and to form their own independent judgement on matters that will enable their participation in society. Enable students to understand why things are the way they are, and how they can be different. This implies that legal education advances certain academic values - intellectual craftsmanship, rigour and integrity, development of the capacities that enable good citizenship. But this of course says little that is distinctive about education in law. Proper law education involves "engaging" with values. Cownie observes that the separation of values from liberal legal education "appears to have been accepted in general". Pue agrees to an extent. Burridge and Webb ask whether liberalism is part of the problem or the solution. Has legal education not taken its liberal ambitions seriously enough, or is the liberal position in legal education flawed in iteself, and needs to be reconsidered? The Values In and Of a Legal Education: 1. Emphasises the primacy of "intellect" , and the development of a "philosophical habit". 2. If it is truly liberal, legal education should not be confined to specialist education and training, it is first and foremost a general "training of the mind".