MARTIN LOUGHLIN

What Should Legal Education Become?

This presentation will propose that the recent, much touted AI revolution should have very little impact on legal education, properly understood. The AI revolution is likely to have a major impact on legal research, writing and examining, but this is tangential to the venture of being educated in the humane practice of law. Legal education, I will argue, mainly involves an immersion into the literature of the subject in the expectation that this leads us to a knowledge of its vocabulary and, eventually, its grammar. It is an exercise in literacy through which we might gain an enhanced appreciation of the challenges entailed in the regulation of social fields through law. Legal education should become what it has always aspired to be: an education in how disputes in society are managed and the authority of a social order maintained.

Martin Loughlin is Professorial Research Fellow and Emeritus Professor of Public Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is a leading scholar in public law and legal theory, known for his influential work on constitutionalism, the foundations of public law, and the nature of the state.

His research explores the theoretical and institutional dimensions of law, including the role of legal reasoning, authority, and the relationship between law and political order. In his recent work, he has reflected critically on the aims of legal education, emphasising its role as a formative intellectual practice grounded in legal literacy and the understanding of how law structures and maintains social order.