ABSTRACT
The notion of liberal education is neither specific to law nor to university education. Its focus begins with the proposition that education is an education for life and that life is not solely concerned with material or utilitarian matters. The idea of a humane centre, a culture which liberal education tries to protect, can be taken to imply a static body of texts which constitute that culture or centre which must be preserved and taught. University legal education in the common-law world has commonly been aggressively atheoretical and anti-intellectual. To be a liberal education a legal education needs to be more than a Leavisite liberal education and needs to include an education in theory. Law schools both believe in, and know very little about, liberal education. Liberal education was both there to preserve ‘the humane centre’ and there to tell the student what ‘the humane centre’ was.
