Reconciling Teaching and Research in Law: An Expatriate Law Teacher's Interdisciplinary Reflection
Journal of Legal Studies Education, Volume 32, Issue 2, pp. 229-254, 2015
30 Pages Posted: 16 Nov 2014 Last revised: 14 May 2020
Date Written: 2014
Abstract
In this paper, I aim to discuss the long debated relationship between research and teaching by examining how this relationship plays out in the discipline of the law in the light of pedagogy and education theory. I argue that law teaching is beneficial to legal research in terms of the professional character of legal education and the practical orientation of legal knowledge. I first survey the research on the relationship between teaching and research in pedagogy and legal scholarship, respectively, and find a juxtaposition of attitudes in these two disciplines: While pedagogy and educational theory focus attention on how to improve learning and teaching through more research on teaching activities, the concern in the legal profession on legal education is that the more sophisticated legal research has become, the further law teaching may be drifting away from the training of legal professionals. With this discovery, I proceed to explore how law teaching and legal research can be bridged by virtue of the practical feature of legal knowledge when we turn attention to the “intangible nexus” between teaching and research in legal pedagogy.
Keywords: legal education, law teaching, legal research, legal pedagogy
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