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Legal Education and the Possibility of Critique: An Australian Perspective*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2014

Ian Duncanson
Ian Duncanson
Affiliation:
Department of Legal Studies, La Trobe University, Australia
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Abstract

A social activity is characterized and understood, this paper argues, only after one has found a place to put it among one's more general understandings and a frame to put around it to render it discrete and prevent its escape into chaos. Framing and reframing are the concomitants of social struggles for and against closure and exclusion. The paper sees critique as a form of practical and scholarly struggle against disciplinary closure, doubting question posed to disciplines. Law school education in Australia, because it offers guaranteed universal knowledge about its object, law, is unsympathetic to critique.

Résumé

Cet article défend la thèse selon laquelle toute activité sociale n'est caractérisée et comprise que dans la mesure où une place lui est faite parmi des connaissances plus générates et qu'elle est bien encadrée afin de la rendreplus discrète et d'éviter ainsi qu'elle ne s'échappe dans le chaos. Le cadrage et le recadrage constituent les activités concomitantes des luttes sociales pour et contre l'etanchéité et l'exclusion. Cet article voit dans la critique un moyen de lutte pratique et savante contre l'étanchéité disciplinaire. L'enseignement offert dans les facultés de droit australiennes n'est pas ouvert à la critique car il offre la garantie d'une connaissance universelle de son objet, le droit.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Fall/automne 1993 , pp. 59 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association 1993

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