Biopolitics and Structure in Legal Education

Taking up the study of legal education in distinctly biopolitical terms, this book provides a critical and political analysis of structure in the law school.

Legal education concerns the complex pathways by which an individual becomes a lawyer, making the journey from lay-person to expert, from student to practitioner. To pose the idea of a biopolitics of legal education is not only to recognise the tensions surrounding this journey, but also to recognise that legal education is a key site in which the subject engages, and is engaged by, a particular structure?and here the particular structure of the law school. This book explores that structure by addressing the characteristics of the biopolitical orders engaged in legal education, including: understanding the lawyer as a commodity, unpicking the force relations in legal education, examining the ways codes of conduct in higher education impact academic freedom, as well as putting the distinctly Western structures of legal learning within a wider context.

Assembling original, field-defining essays by both leading international scholars and emerging researchers, it constitutes an indispensable resource in legal education research and scholarship that will appeal to legal academics everywhere.

"Biopolitics and Structure in Legal Education is an examination of how the different actors of legal education participate in the systems that form the law school, the connections that develop from these systems, and how overarching contexts shape legal education. ... It is hoped that this publication will encourage further critical and rich investigations that illuminate and question the existing components of legal education. Moreover, this contribution will be of interest to legal educators, as they work within (and beyond) these structures." Aysha Mazhar, Keele School of Law, UK, The Law Teacher 2024