The discipline of law : legal education at the intersection of the juridical and the disciplinary

Abstract

This article seeks to move beyond pre‐existing critiques of legal education as ideological training. Employing emerging interpretations of the Foucaultian concepts of the juridical and the disciplinary, it provides an analysis of the extent to which the expression ‘law as a academic discipline’ refers to more than a distinct body of substantive principles. In particular, it illustrates the extent to which legal education is a discursive practice constituted simultaneously by a substantive construct of juridical power and a catalogue of disciplinary legal methods. While conceding the pervasive ascription of disciplinary power within the overall institutional framework of higher education, this article examines the specifically disciplinary nature of the legal method’. It is submitted that legal education's emphasis upon superficially objective and technical skills permits the perpetuation of juridical legal rhetoric through the ascription of methodological dictates. These methodological dictates discipline the mind of the law student into conformity with the official rhetoric of authority and impartiality that are the characteristic traits of the juridical syntax.