ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter develops the arguments of the previous chapters to provide a provocative manifesto that can be used to help reshape legal education. It stresses the need for Subversive Legal History to be seen as an approach to law that needs to be used and applied by all students and teachers. The chapter argues that the role of legal education is more than the learning of a body of knowledge that we reify as ‘the law’. It contends that a Legal History approach is useful here as a method which highlights the contingent, chaotic and constructed nature of what are often presented as objective truths. Legal History is reconceptualised as a method that can build upon doctrinal legal studies to better understand law both internally and externally (as well as appreciating that a dividing line cannot be drawn between law and society). Law degrees and law modules need to pay attention to the intellectual development of the law and its development within a social context. There always needs to be both an intellectual history and a social history of the law being studied. This includes subjecting secondary sources (such as textbook commentaries on the law) to the same rigour as primary sources are subjected to. The chapter highlights the importance of textbook writers in the common law tradition and the extent to which they are responsible for the classifications, distinctions and fundamental ideas which underpin the respective areas of law: the common lore. A subversive approach necessitates not only highlighting and questioning the constructed nature of the law but also embracing different perspectives that change the lens by which law students see and understand not only law but how law operates within. The chapter calls on Law Schools to embrace the chaos of the common law.
