To bring interdisciplinary turn in legal education

In the beginning of the 20th century, Rosco Pound's idea of conceptualising law as ‘a means of social engineering’ informs the deep-rooted necessity of designing legal education to enable a particularly important kind or participation in the affairs of social life. The International Law Commission believes that legal education should include the diffusion of education about law in society to stimulate reforms in the legal system.

In arguing for an interdisciplinary turn in legal education in India, Professor N R Madhava Menon uses a quite illuminating analogy that the purpose of legal education should be understood with reference to the relationship between medical science and health science: medical science teaches to cure the disease but health science speaks for how to attain and maintain good health. By this analogy he thus claims that the purpose of legal education should not be confined only to the development of technical skill of solving legal dispute, it should also be defined to include the aspect of how to build a just society. The truth of this analogy has found place in the Indian curriculum of legal study which now prescribes the requirement of studying some interdisciplinary courses alongside.

In this respect, the position of American Professor Ulen is also noteworthy who has taken the law and economics movement as a way to bring the scientific method into legal education that better serves to educate the students about the practice of law.

The interdisciplinary approach has very limitedly placed in the legal education of Bangladesh and the traditional legal education is mainly designed to produce lawyers who are comparable to the technicians, because of having only the technical knowledge of solving the legal problems. On the other hand, the lawyers educated in interdisciplinary curriculum can really contribute in ‘social programming’ by using the knowledge of social context and the effect of law in the society. Such an approach can take us away from the cave of legicentrism - a cave where students are not allowed to look beyond the the black letters of law.     

Richard Posner has identified the ideal of ‘in medias res’ (that is, taking a particular law and legal system as correct without further inquiry) as one of the basic problems associated with traditional legal education. And an interdisciplinary turn in legal education is more likely to offer a wider avenue of searching the truth of it.