The Spirit of Modern Academic Legal Education: Towards Governing Principles

The contribution promotes the idea of principles in academic legal education. Principles are taken to be abstract notions that can offer a certain direction of things in academic legal education. The paper posits that such principles should be taken into account both in the designing and the implementation of programmes of legal study and law degrees in the academic environment. Law is, of course, to this day, a largely divided discipline, especially considering that law has traditionally been in the hands of nation-states. By extension, legal education around the world may be perceived as largely divided too, because the discipline of law has been divided in the first place. However, the proposed principles are ones that ought to come with certain universal characteristics to them. Equally, they should also make allowance for certain local variation where possible, albeit not always and not necessarily. Recognition is also given to the fact that such a degree of local variation could be more significant where such could be justifiably supported by a domestic academic legal community and/or a domestic professional class of legal practitioners. Furthermore, the contribution offers specific examples of principles which can function as overall guiding principles for university law degrees around the world. The paper concludes with an overview of its main findings.