The Education of Attention and Encounter in the Legal Academy

The Moral Imagination and the Legal Life: Beyond Text in Legal Education, Zenon Bankowski and Maksymilian Del Mar, eds., Ashgate, 2012

Posted: 25 Mar 2009 Last revised: 29 Mar 2018

Date Written: March 25, 2009

Abstract

This paper argues that moral education in the legal academy ought to address the problematic effects of immersion in the role-differentiated behaviour and professionalism of the legal life. This immersion results in the acquisition, by persons, of patterns of embodied and embedded salience, which have the effect of influencing persons to notice only certain things, and relate to others in certain ways, which suit the tasks and purposes of those specific environments. The effects of salience are pernicious for the moral life, for they tend to mean that persons fail to see the limitations of, and fail to consider alternatives to, those features of situations that they already find valuable and important, and those ways of relating to others that are already convenient and comfortable to them. Moral education in the legal academy can counter these effects via the education of attention and encounter. The focus in the paper is on articulating the aims of such an education and offering resources, especially resources that go beyond text, which may be utilised in legal academies to further those aims.

Keywords: legal education, moral education, moral sensitivity, attention, encounter, emodiment, connectionism, legal knowledge

JEL Classification: K00

Suggested Citation

Del Mar, Maksymilian T., The Education of Attention and Encounter in the Legal Academy (March 25, 2009). The Moral Imagination and the Legal Life: Beyond Text in Legal Education, Zenon Bankowski and Maksymilian Del Mar, eds., Ashgate, 2012 , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1368165

Maksymilian T. Del Mar (Contact Author)

affiliation not provided to SSRN

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