Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Aspirational Law Teaching

Gordon Smith dug up a fascinating quote from Lawrence Friedman about the “obsoleteness” of law teaching:

In general, the law schools fail to teach the legal system as a whole, let alone the legal system as part of society; they teach disjointed fragments of a fragment.

Which remains true today, over 40 years later. Gordon goes on to discuss his aspirations for his Contracts class, including this nugget of wisdom:

We must become experts in understanding how legal rules express themselves in the lives of real people. This requires us to treat the study of law as more than a series of logical puzzles. In the final analysis, our goal is to develop a better understanding of human behavior.

Do go read the whole post.