The thing about canons, whether literary or legal, is that no one agrees on them until they’re under siege. Then suddenly, they become sacred; but before that, they’re just there, obvious, assumed, like gravity or bad coffee on campus.
Literature has had its canon wars: the old dead white men, the reinventions, the rediscoveries, the bitter conferences where academics bristle over whether Chaucer is still relevant when people don’t even know what a reeve is. The law is supposed to be beyond that. A serious, structured discipline where you don’t waste time debating whether a certain precedent has overstayed its welcome. And yet, the core law curriculum has its own version of this fight, perhaps less dramatic but just as ideological.
There’s always been a tension between legal education as a vocational exercise - teaching students how to draft contracts, file claims, and pass the professional exams - and legal education as an intellectual discipline. The latter, the argument goes, is about training people to think like lawyers rather than simply behave like them. Reading cases, understanding them, interpreting them, isn’t just about knowing what the law is, but about seeing how it works, where it cracks and where it bends. Like literature, law is about interpretation. The meaning of a statute, like the meaning of a novel, isn’t simply what’s written down: it’s what’s constructed through argument, precedent, and context. The best legal minds aren’t the ones who can recite doctrine like a well-trained parrot: they’re the ones who can see the gaps, the tensions, the absurdities, the ones who understand that a legal principle, like a literary theme, is often a fragile thing, subject to history, politics, and, let’s be honest, luck. A curriculum focused purely on vocational training turns law into a trade, a set of formulas to be applied. Useful, yes. Necessary, absolutely. But limiting. The best lawyers (and I mean the ones who make a mark, not just the ones who make money) are the ones who understand law not as a fixed thing, but as a dynamic interaction between society, individuals, and institutions. This requires critical thinking, not rote learning.
So, should an LLB prepare students for practice? Of course. But should it also train them to see law in its broader, messier context? If it doesn’t, then we’re just churning out technicians, not thinkers.