Legal Education: In Favour of an Undergraduate Faculty of Law

Abstract

T HERE is a tendency today to assume that a legal education neither is nor can be a liberal education and that if a lawyer is to have a liberal education, he must get it before he takes up law. I have reference especially to the practice, becoming increasingly more common, of making a bachelor of arts degree from an accredited university a prerequisite for admission to law school.1 Now, requiring the beginning student first to take a university degree, on the face of it, seems laudable. It reflects a well-meant desire to improve standards. The lawyer is to be a man of liberal as well as legal education, a man of vision and intelligence as well as a professional craftsman. About the wisdom of the end in view, the competent professional man of insight and culture, there is no question. But with the wisdom of the means to attain that end, the compulsory university degree, I take issue. I suspect that the years spent acquiring a bachelor of arts degree merely prolong without improving legal education. So far am I from approving of the addition to the curriculum of the bachelor of arts degree that I would eliminate it. I would like to see, rather than a compulsory bachelor of arts course followed by a bachelor of laws course, an enlarged bachelor of laws course which would operate at the undergraduate level as an alternative to the bachelor of arts course. This is not the combined arts and law course which has been offered in some law schools in recent times. Its object was merely to integrate arts and law work. My position is that law, although a separate intellectual discipline, has the same liberal effects as, and ought to be an adequate alternative to, arts. Leave the law school an independent autonomous faculty, but make it function not at the graduate level, as is commonly the case in the United States and Canada, but at the undergraduate level, as in Europe and to some extent in England. I contend that legal education, notwithstanding its professional status, can and ought to be a liberal education. Already the objective, if not the achievement, of our best law schools is the same as that of the schools in the humanities. Perhaps the distinctive feature of the best law schools is their endeavour to fit their students for the world not only as it is but as it will be in twenty years. For this they train their students to reason rather than to remember and in so doing provide them with something that will endure rather than depreciate with time, that will be useful at the end as well as at the beginning of their practice.