The Metamorphosis of Legal Education Symposium on Legal Education

Professor Brook\u27s remarks this morning provide a context for my own. I mean to say a word or two for the classical era. One of the characteristics of legal education over the past half century or so, one that we ought not give up, has been its passion for order in a chaotic world. Striking as it is to say that a passion for order ill suits a chaotic world, the world has ever been chaotic – and that passion, our principal defense. The question is, with what principles of order do we exercise that passion, to subdue unruly fact. Do we look to doctrine, to the characteristic tools of the legal profession, to understandings economic or semiological? Recent years have seen a shift in focus concerning what constitutes order, at least from a pedagogic perspective. We have turned our attention to the instrumental or vocational side of the legal profession, as distinct from concern for the content of law and the public order aspirations to which law may relate. That shift seems to me reflected in Professor Gorman\u27s comments