ABSTRACT
This chapter is the second part of an exploration of the status of legal education as a core jurisprudential activity. In the first piece, I described how in the eleventh century the newly discovered Justinianic codes and texts, voluminous, exotic, arcane, were collated, understood and put into practice, along with the ever-burgeoning, increasingly complex codes of canon law. In this sense, legal educational forms, cultures, technologies and genres on the one hand and legal jurisprudential methods on the other were closely allied in their early development. There was an ‘originary intimacy’ between legal method and educational method. Here, I make the claim that the uneasy status of legal education stems not just from its multidisciplinary origins, but from it having no apparent place in the foundational methods and knowledge structures within the legal academy. This perennial anxiety, I argue, is a result of our loss of perspective brought about by modern amnesiac constructions of legal education: viewed from a different angle, the educative core of legal education has always been part of law’s project, at least in the global north and west. To demonstrate how this might come about, a thought experiment is constructed, multidisciplinary and grounded in a particular mode of realist analysis. I argue that now, a millennium after law’s early educations, we need to return the ‘originary intimacy’ between education and method. I claim that within the modern period such intimacy, of necessity always in tension, always critical, is essential for both law and its educations.
