Legal Education and Legal Traditions: Selected Essays

Book excerpt: This book deals with aspects of legal education and legal traditions. Part I includes chapters on teaching Law of the Sea, legal ethics and educating lawyers as ‘transaction cost engineers’ as well as comparison of teaching law in a refugee camp and in a Malaysian University. Part II on legal and philosophical traditions includes essays on what later philosophers would have commented on Plato’s arguments in the Crito regarding ‘absolute obligation to obey the law’ and what Socrates would have said on two conversations in the 19th century novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin regarding the morality and legality of harbouring runaway slaves. Part II concludes with two essays regarding the applicability of the Hart-Devlin debate on the ‘enforcement of morals’ vis-à-vis the International Criminal Court and an essay on what the historian Arnold Toynbee would have commented on the ‘contingency’ v ‘teleology’ debate between two palaeontologists the late Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris. • Legal education of interest to legal educators and students • Legal, political, moral philosophy as well as philosophy of history of interest to law, philosophy and history teachers, postgraduate and under graduate students• Aspects of legal ethics for law teachers, students and legal professionals• Interdisciplinary studies regarding law and economics, law and literature, law and social justice for law, humanities, social science academics and students.