The rule of law and legal education: Do they still connect?

Abstract

When we connect legal education and the rule of law, it has two connotations: to what extent should legal education be protected by the rule of law; and to what extent should the rule of law be taught within legal education? It is not difficult to see how both con-notations could cause problems in certain countries where the rule of law might exist in a different form. For example, China is becoming a rule of law-based country in respect of its commercial and intellectual property rights, yet its record on human rights and the due prosecution of them is abysmal. The rule of law like most legal rubrics is slippery and tends to avoid easy definition.1 Jeremy Waldron captures this when he says, ‘people’s estimation of the importance of the Rule of Law sometimes depends on which paradigm of law is being spoken about’.2 For Aristotle safety was located in customary law and for Hayek it was the evolutionary development of the Common Law.3 Tom Bingham’s idea of a thick definition of the rule of law is appealing since it is elastic and has an anthropological intuition about it that maintains a connection to community.4 In con-trast to Waldron who would keep the rule of law at a meta-level rather than a substantive one, Bingham includes specific instances of rule categories such as, notably, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in which the right to education is enshrined.5