Book chapter
Teaching Cultural Legal Studies
Biopolitics and Resistance in Legal Education, pp.137-153
Routledge
2023
Abstract
This essay reflects on teaching Cultural Legal Studies as an elective within the contemporary law school curriculum in Australia. Drawing upon, yet distinct from, consonant courses in law and literature, and law and popular culture, Cultural Legal Studies offers a distinctive encounter and a training in a particular interpretative method that gives it a unique role within legal education, construed broadly as a humanist tradition. Cultural Legal Studies calls attention to the way in which law itself is constituted by, and operative through, cultural texts – literature, images, and film. Its wager is that understanding the cultural constitution of law is central to legal education. It recognises the experiences of law within the classroom, not simply as a simulation, representation or reference to its existence in legal institutions. It therefore sees the nature of legal education as about bringing students to a point not of simply gaining legal knowledge, skills, or modes of thinking, but recognising those ways of legal thinking which they are already living within as legal subjects training to be custodians of the law. In developing their own readings of cultural legal texts, students construct and take responsibility for their own act of creative interpretation, of meaning-making, drawing upon an older practice of jurisprudence as a means of reading and crafting with text. In the process of gaining a greater knowledge of the frameworks, discourses, and cultures of legality within which we live, a recognition of how we are already participatory in the constitution of law itself is achieved.
Details
- Title
- Teaching Cultural Legal Studies
- Authors
- Timothy Peters (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Law and SocietyKaren Crawley (Author) - Griffith University
- Contributors
- Thomas Giddens (Editor) - University of DundeeLuca Siliquini-Cinelli (Editor) - Cardiff University
- Publication details
- Biopolitics and Resistance in Legal Education, pp.137-153
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Date published
- 2023
- DOI
- 10.4324/9781003179283-12; 10.4324/9781003179283
- ISBN
- 9781003179283
- Organisation Unit
- School of Law and Society
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99734297002621
- Output Type
- Book chapter
Metrics
103 File views/ downloads
78 Record Views