Transformation, tension and transgression : reflections on the culture and ideology of South African legal education

dc.contributor.authorModiri, Joel Malesela
dc.date.accessioned2014-07-01T10:38:21Z
dc.date.available2014-07-01T10:38:21Z
dc.date.issued2013
dc.description.abstractThis article enquires into and joins the critique of the current state of legal education in South Africa against the backdrop of a post-modern, post-colonial and post-apartheid context. In response to current debates on the state of legal education and the quality of the graduates it produces, the author argues that the problem goes beyond the failure to provide corporate law firms with appropriately skilled and qualified graduates but also has implications for substantive democracy, active political citizenship, transformation, freedom, justice, and ethics. Through a survey of select legal education literature in South Africa and abroad, the author identifies the central problem as being the reliance by most South African law teachers on the dominant paradigm of traditional (or black-letter) legal education. Following the writings of Duncan Kennedy and Michel Foucault, this paradigm of traditional education is shown as being not only pedagogically ineffective but also politically corrupt and ideologically conservative. While failing to impart critical thinking skills to law students, it also works to co-opt them into the service of hierarchy and hegemony and functions to discipline them into docility, thereby legitimating the conservative legal culture. As an alternative, the author proposes the turn towards a more critical, engaged approach to legal education, drawing in particular from critical legal studies ("CLS") and from the critical liberatory pedagogy of Paulo Freire and bell hooks. By following a more critical direction, and by enabling students to think critically about law, to question and to transgress, legal education can serve as a practice of freedom. The broad aim of the article then is to put forward a set of ideas contemplating a legal education that is otherwise, that brings something else into the law classroom such that it might serve as the meeting point between law and justice.en_US
dc.description.librarianam2014en_US
dc.description.urihttp://www.jutalaw.co.za/catalogue/itemdisplay.jsp?item_id=3603en_US
dc.identifier.citationModiri, JM 2013, 'Transformation, tension and transgression : reflections on the culture and ideology of South African legal education', Stellenbosch Law Review, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 455-479.en_US
dc.identifier.issn1016-4359
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/2263/40475
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.publisherJuta Lawen_US
dc.rightsJuta Lawen_US
dc.subjectTransformationen_US
dc.subjectTensionen_US
dc.subjectTransgressionen_US
dc.subjectSouth African legal educationen_US
dc.subjectConventionen_US
dc.subjectTraditional legal educationen_US
dc.titleTransformation, tension and transgression : reflections on the culture and ideology of South African legal educationen_US
dc.typeArticleen_US

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