Some Thoughts on Law Teaching and the Social Sciences

Abstract

There has been much talk in recent years, emanating largely from the law schools of Columbia and Yale Universities, about law as one of the social sciences. Yet neither of these schools, nor any other law school, has attempted to develop a program of studies in which this thought appears as a reality instead of merely an interesting or challenging suggestion. Many explanations might be offered for the continued failure of law school curricula to reflect the interrelation between law and such other studies as economics, sociology and political science; it is my belief that one of the foremost factors has been the presence, among the required first-year studies of practically all law schools, of a number of courses of synthesis such as Agency, Contracts and Torts,-courses which purport to assemble supposedly comnion legal factors from widely diverse transactional fields. The conventional procedure in such courses is to evolve or induce a general principle from a variety of specific situations which may be, and usually are, quite unrelated factually. Not infrequently the facts of these illustrative cases are connected with fairly well-defined economic or social institutions, such as banking or taxation or the family. But since neither instructor nor student can pretend to expert or detailed knowledge of all these fields, the problems are of necessity divorced from their factual background and only the abstractions of legal theory are investigated-a practice which completely ignores the conception of law as a social science. These abstract courses are objectionable not merely because they omit any intensive study of the institutional background of the specific disputes dealt with, btut also because they are unsound pedagogically: (i) they present a distorted impression as to the degree of certainty in the law; (2) they occupy the student's time and energy with the acquisition of information and technical skill which are less important than the knowledge and techniques which he might otherwise develop during the same period if a considerable nunmber of his law school courses should focus upon a human institution as a field of fact rather than upon a legal concept. The course in Agency will serve as a convenient illustration. Does the law of Agency deal with the legal problems arising out of the conduct of affairs by othiers? ' Does it relate to the legal problems involved when one