Teaching in Tallinn: the post-modern law school?

In this article from the Spring 2003 issue of Directions Igor Gräzin, Dean of the Private Academy Nord Law School, Estonia, provides a perspective on the development of legal education in eastern Europe and the setting up of the first accredited law school in Estonia.

Note: this article is an abridged version of a paper delivered by Professor Gräzin at the European Law Faculties Association Annual Conference 2003.

Post-modernism has never been defined either as an ideological/philosophical phenomenon or as a fact or feature of social reality. Nevertheless, there is general agreement that it not only comes after modernism but is also a kind of non-modernism.

Modernism started in the late 18th century and can be characterised by some general features:

• the creation of a modern political and cultural landscape (political right and left; liberalism and socialism in all their modifications; industrialism versus agrarianism; the appearance of ‘schools’ in arts and architecture; classical and modern types of education)
• the appearance of modern corporate structures, replacing patriarchal structures (the modern corporation versus the Amt of old craftsmen; trade unions and clubs of industrialists; separation of monetary circulation from manufacturing; state authorisation and licensing of professions and their politicisation)
• the canonisation of secular ‘big ideas’ about humanity itself, its history and future (the ideas of communism, the welfare state, human progress, national culture and identity)

All these features had a direct impact on legal education and the legal profession in eastern Europe. Once just a bit less than a clerk and more like a cleaning man, the City Syndicus gradually became an influential part of the court system, and the law school (note the word school, ie an institution for craftsmen) became a department in an organisation of a much higher calling – the university. The title doctor juris would have sounded in the medieval Hanseatic city as comical as ‘professor of hairdressing’.

What are the most important features of modern jurisprudence?

• its practical orientation – although practitioners have become ‘gentlemen’, examples of old diminishing attitudes can still be found in the novels of Gogol and Kafka, and also in modern American legal humour
• the systematisation of legal knowledge – starting from Bacon’s New Organon and ending with Bentham, as empirical modernists tried their own systems of human knowledge. Legal education in universities follows a particular sequence – property law before contract, Roman Law before Civil Law etc.
• the system of accreditation of the law school – i.e. the corporatisation of the legal profession (the classical Slavic word for a ‘lawyer’ has to do with the verb ‘stryapat’ – to hang around with papers, trying to make little deals for noble people). A job that could be done by literally anybody who “happened to be sober and indicated some sense of healthy mind” (Gogol).
• part of the ‘big idea’ about the law was simplified by the analytical legal tradition (from Austin to Hart, from Fuller to Kelson, from Llewellyn to Lenin) – the legislator legislates and the judge applies
• the two traditional teaching methods were canonised; the doctrinal one, mainly lecturing (how Kant taught) and the so-called Socratic method (practised in the US). Both methods actively deny the merits of each other (as they must be in a polarised world of modernism!), not noticing that in both cases the final goal is one and the same; indoctrination and socialisation into a pre-existing closed community.

Experiences from an Estonian law school

Academy Nord is a post-modern educational institution par excellence – we are relatively young, we were born on the still smoking ruins of the Soviet regime and we had to start almost from nothing (not even having our own room!). At first we were not even clear about what to teach and what kind of profession we should give to our graduates. Since those almost pre-historic days some 10 years ago we have become a fully accredited law school.

The post-modern world brings with it newer and tougher competition in the job market. Unemployment rates are skyrocketing among the young, signifying the end of the ‘student as a profession’ which few but the wealthiest can afford. Legal education is becoming a supplementary activity for those who are working already and can pay for their tuition. Our law school timetables are no longer autonomous, but have to fit into the daily working routines of our students.

The classic relationship between the student and the teacher is reversed. In areas of practical lawyering the knowledge brought to the class comes from practitioners, while the teacher’s role is to interpret this practice, implant it into the general course and then pass it on. The key goal of classical teaching methods – to teach the ‘right law’ or ‘the law that is’ (whether in the Pound or Austinian sense) – has simply disappeared, together with the disappearance of the ‘right law’. The formation of the law now occurs to some extent in Parliament, and to a more significant extent on the Internet. The finding of the law in the latter is not a matter of indoctrination.

This represents the disappearance of the ‘system’ of legal education – a very sad phenomenon for professors of my generation. In the past we were accustomed to build our teaching on the pre-existence of factual data and knowledge. Now that is not necessarily the case, and even the ‘individual counselling’ of students is no longer possible amongst the 600 students in our small school. If such issues can’t be taken seriously, what about the really important ones? Our courses have to become self-sufficient, leading paradoxically to the waste of precious time due to the need to repeat the same basic material over and over again.

It would be too much to say that legal education is in deep crisis in Estonia, but the requirements of the practising legal profession seem to be met by universities to an ever smaller degree. We do not feel ourselves comfortable in this new environment, we are a bit lost, we are not sure whether we know that we are doing the right thing and too many of us are thinking about early retirement.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010