IDEAS TO SHAPE THE FUTURE

Law was first taught in Europe in the 11th century at the University of Bologna. By the 12th century, around 50 to 60 law schools were using Bologna’s teaching model, including the faculties of Lerida, Perugia, Oxford, Cambridge, and Toulouse. In the United States, the first law school was William & Mary in Virginia, founded in 1779.

Today, law is taught in public and private universities, and many faculties train students to become lawyers. It is a heavily regulated profession with high entry barriers. In many countries, it requires an undergraduate degree, a graduate degree, an internship, and an entrance exam to join a professional bar association.

As society and higher education in general have evolved, so has the teaching of law. More and more universities are turning to less theoretical and more practical training through different teaching methods, such as case studies, the Socratic method, and problem-solving. Many law schools have also included skills-based training in addition to specific legal knowledge.

Currently, there are three main challenges that will impact how law is taught in the future: internationalization, multidisciplinarity, and digital immersion.

Nowadays, the professional practice of law, and of other legal fields such as the judiciary, has a marked international focus, not only because of the importance of large global business law firms, but also because the issues that most lawyers must deal with are increasingly international in nature, due to the globalization of the economy and the flows of people and services around the world. Therefore, this reality of the practice of law is one of the factors that must be reflected when teaching this discipline, with training that responds to the international legal services model required by society – as it is today and as it continues to evolve tomorrow.

The second element of teaching law in the future is multidisciplinarity. This element gains relevance as law schools move away from theory and towards practice. The law cannot be practiced in isolation from other disciplines, since the legal industry does not exist in isolation from the economy or from politics, for example. Thus, the teaching of law cannot remain oblivious to these other disciplines, which play such an important role in legal institutions and in conflict resolution.

Thirdly, law and legal services are changing in lockstep with the evolution of the digital society. On the one hand, regulation in the area of digital and technology law, including artificial intelligence, is increasing. In addition, legal advisors must provide advice to their clients’ transactions, taking place while the digital transformation of their business is happening. Consequently, the teaching of law must reflect the new reality of the legal ecosystem and of the services provided by the legal profession.

Law students of the future need training that reflects the international, multidisciplinary, and digital approach if they are to respond to the future challenges of the labor market and continue to play their essential role as architects of society.

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