July 3, 2025
This post is about the law.
It is not about whether law is law. This question is increasingly coming out and prominently. The man or woman on the Clapham omnibus are reading dreadful news coming from all over the world about war, violence, despair, abuse of power, and are asking: “Is international law really law?”. This is a legitimate question but it is a topic for another post.
My question here is what we – as professionals – include in the expression “law”. And the question refers to both what we teach and what we research on. (And the plane of the discussion is not really theoretical: you are not reading a legal theory essay here!)
You might be prompted into saying: “Hey, isn’t it a bit late for you to ask this very basic question after decades of activity in the field?”. My answer would be: “No”.
Why is it so?
For various reasons. First, the world is changing dramatically. Not only are the political and economic fundamentals that have shaped our order since at least WW-II put into question (and it is a few years now), but there are also crucial leaps in technology (such as AI) that are changing even the most basic activities that we do. Society is changing too. Information (perhaps not always true and reliable) is massively accessible. All these momentous and terribly fast changes do require a renewed understanding of what we teach to our students as law – what, as scholars, we research as legal questions.
Get me right.
It is not only about the content of the law that is continuously re-shaped and should be adjusted to these changes. It is, more fundamentally, about the actual contours of what we conceive as law.
I might have evaded this concern had I continued my academic career in a law school To be sure, these are the fundamental questions that any contemporary and global law school are asking. But the concern has become even more acute since mid-February when I joined an academic institution where lawyers work with political scientists, economists, historians, sociologists, linguists. Nothing can be taken for granted when I talk with new non-lawyer colleagues. No assumption can be made. “All this is very good”, you may say. It opens your mind. It avoids path-dependency and provincialism.
Quite right.
But, more radically, the question is: how do I re-define the contours of my discipline? How can I make it more meaningful in the actual context I live and work in? How can my legal teaching be more useful to students that are exposed to different disciplines? Ultimately, what does it mean to be “lawyers”, and “academic lawyers”, in 2025? To simply answer that law is about knowing laws and regulations, and courts’ decisions, and master legal interpretation, would be utterly simplistic. Surely, you need that. These are the basic tools of the trade. But – and this is the point – this is not enough – if you want to understand how the law works, if you need to apply the law in real scenarios. If we were simply teaching the content of treaties, laws and decisions, without anything more, we would have missed the point. Equally, if legal scholarship is measured only against the benchmark of good old black-letter or doctrinal traditions, the academic landscape would quickly become dry and, frankly, useless.
The learned reader would have realised that the question and concern underlying these posts are not really new. But any generation, in particular at key junctures in time, re-ask these questions.
The “art and science” of law (jurisprudence) should be open to the understanding and analysis of any factor and discipline that may have an impact on legal relationships. Just the very first day as trainee lawyer in a law firm or pupil in chambers, in a court or administration, in an international organisation or a company is sufficient to realise that law in action is much more than you were taught in law school. There is much more in law than litigation and judge-driven legal interpretation. You have law-making processes of various types and at various levels. You increasingly have soft-and-informal law mechanisms. You have negotiations and various forms of mediation. Positive law and its letter is just a prism, the central focus (start/end point) of a process, which is a legal process too. We need to be, to train, professionals that understand and can manage these processes, its forces and dynamics. To a large extent, law has originated as the ultimate tool to govern all the forces, dynamics and interests involved in these processes. As a tool to shape through order what would otherwise by conflictual and chaotic. (This complexity explains why I talk of “art-and-science” of the law. My memory goes back to various conversations I have had over the years with colleagues and friends on this classification.)
Obviously, lawyers will remain lawyers and will never become sociologists, economists etc, but we need to have a much more explicit and rounded awareness of the various nuances that law has in all its specific contexts – local, domestic, international, transnational, global.
In a sense, my job in tackling these questions is easier since, mostly dealing with economic law, it is inevitable that my teaching and research are duly informed by economic thinking and literature (and, beyond those, to IR, political science, history etc). The subject-matter is naturally open to other disciplines. But, I would submit, the same applies for any area of the law.
The time may have come for a serious re-consideration of syllabi where law is taught. And it would be great if this process started and were pushed from the bottom-up (not the top-down). Leave the re-design of law degrees and modules to the innovation and experience of individual lecturers and universities. Each should capitalise on their interests, expertise and advantages, thus broadening the offering in the market – to the ultimate benefit of students and society. We should all benefit from this diversity. To put it another way, leave it to those that deal with these issues day-by-day to explore unchartered lands and re-define boundaries. They are the ones at the frontier. They know the problems, concerns, difficulties.
In the end, this process of re-definition of identity is so crucial and delicate that any centralised effort would be brutally doomed.
lucaslaws 