Cultivating lawyers: education or inculcation

In his paper Gary Watt (University of Warwick) reflected on the first year of teaching a new module in law and literature, with special reference to the way it challenges norms of legal and legal educational culture.

The session was blogged on Digital Directions and Zeugma.

The growing area of law and humanities scholarship aims to engage the law with other disciplines and to explore that engagement educationally through the use of a broader range of reading and critical perspectives. The law and literature module involves an element of creative writing, with special attention paid to the rhetorical anatomy of language. This has revealed a deep connection between legal language and spatial metaphors of enclosure. The word ‘court’, for example, derives from the Latin hortus, which denotes an enclosed garden – ‘court culture’ and ‘horticulture’ share the same root. The etymology of the word ‘educate’, in contrast, means ‘to lead out’ (Latin: ex ducere).

Gary argued that modern legal education must find creative ways to accommodate the potential conflict between the educational culture of exploration and the legal culture of enclosure, demonstrating how attempts are made to manage this conflict in the form and substance of the module. One method is to accompany students from the law school building to their teaching space on the adjacent campus and to make the walk itself (which passes through woods and departs from the routine path) a part of the process of educational discovery.

To teach when walking, and to teach by walking, has a respectable pedigree. Aristotle’s educational method was to walk as he talked, from which his students acquired the label peripatetikos.

The real challenge is to step outside the norms of legal education without taking a walk on the unduly wild side. Aristotle favoured a via media in most things, and it is believed that he achieved this in his educational method by walking within a courtyard.

On the law and literature module even our enclosed teaching spaces permit us to stand and walk and perform, and even (on one occasion) to build forts and engage in a literary battle of wits. Since true education entails ‘leading out’, it is inevitably eccentric, but the alternative is inculcation – literally, to dig one’s heels in, or to keep treading the same ground.

During a short walk around campus various elements were pointed out to demonstrate the potential for opening up legal education to literary and other inter-disciplinary approaches, with reference to the law and literature module and related initiatives including Warwick Law Cinema.

There is an echo here of pedagogy in the original sense, since the pedagogus was the slave who escorted children to school, but what is intended is the exact opposite to slavish routine – rather to move from the usual rooms of the law to an inter-disciplinary garden where there is space for the growth and cultivation (cultura) of a new breed of lawyer. Perhaps we will feel like Alice:

Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rathole – she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of the dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway.

In the end, Alice discovered that “very few things indeed were really impossible”.

Mark Davys (Keele University) reports:

Gary illustrated how text and experience can be combined to make legal education into exploration (educate = ex ducere, to lead out) rather than an exercise in confinement. He highlighted how the language of the law is dominated by metaphors of enclosure (court = hortus, enclosed garden) and immobility (I remain unsure as to just how many English legal terms we identified that are derived from stasis).
 
Gary then took us on a short walk around the Warwick campus, where we were invited to make links between the things we saw and the law – and to reflect on the meaning of the word ‘party’ – and to discuss them when we paused at the amphitheatre, a tree and a cascading stream and pool. It was interesting to note how the flowing water was confined by artificial structures – a reminder, perhaps, of the way in which lawyers use text to contain and control (and interpret) the real world. Deliberately or not, the session had come full circle.
 
(See Mark’s concluding comments in his report on the other paper in this session, Beyond text in legal education.)

About Gary

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Gary Watt is a reader in law and associate professor at Warwick School of Law. He was co-organiser of a conference on Shakespeare and the law in 2007 and is co-author of Shakespeare and the law (Hart, 2008), as well as editor of Law and the Humanities. Gary presented a paper on a more humanities-based approach to law at Learning in Law Annual Conference 2008, developing ideas set down in his paper The soul of legal education (2006).
 
Gary was named Law Teacher of the Yearc 2009 at the conference dinner.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010