Vulnerability theory as a tool against a banking model of legal education

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine how university-based legal education has been facing pressures founded on a growing free-market fundamentalism which strengthen in law schools worldwide a model of education that Paulo Freire termed “banking”. In countries of Latin American constitutionalism like Brazil, such pressures also entail the denigration of progressive understandings of the social right to education which have been inscribed in their constitutions. Against this trend, I contend that engaged law educators could benefit from using vulnerability theory, a critical legal theory devised by Martha Albertson Fineman, as a pedagogical tool considering how it lends itself to immediate use in the analysis of legal categories and in the problematisation of legal systems in a way not readily available to general critical pedagogies. In this way, legal educators can open up dialogues that promote awareness in law students who might otherwise resist discussing these topics because they are opposed to their expectations from law schools, aligned as they might be with market-based understandings of the purposes of a legal education.