Legal Knowledge For Our Times: Rethinking Legal Knowledge and Legal Education

The essays gathered for this symposium reflect a number of overlapping concerns about contemporary legal knowledge and education. Though they are considerably diverse in focus and subject-matter, ranging from admissions to films to marketing of law faculties, each of these articles addresses aspects of legal education, the construction of legal knowledge and the character of what Ian Duncanson calls the law discipline. Educational practice, knowledge and disciplinarity are thoroughly inter-related. The contributors to this volume are all acutely aware that, as educators and researchers, we both: participate in the construction of legal knowledge (for the readers of learned journals, for our students, for ourselves, occasionally for the media or in representative roles) AND are subjected to constructions and constraints on legal knowledges produced elsewhere (in courts, in legislatures, government ministries, law offices, law societies, in the research of others, in political parties, in the media and the discourses of daily life and, pre-eminently, in radio talk-shows, US television sitcoms and television commercials). In short, we construct legal knowledge, but not entirely under conditions of our own choosing. The construction of legal knowledge is important to us. It affects our lives. In many ways it is our lives