Legal didactics

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Legal didactics is the science of teaching and learning law and jurisprudence . Other terms are also used depending on the subject of scientific consideration. In Germany and in the German-speaking area in general, this branch of science has only developed increasingly in recent years, in English-speaking countries it traditionally attracts more attention.

Terms and delimitations

Law didactics

Legal studies as cursory informational knowledge related to individual topics or individual cases without understanding the reasons and contexts and without methodical ability to investigate, apply and further develop the law (Bergmans) forms the core subject of legal didactics, which, however, goes well beyond this, especially with regard to methodological skills and scientificity. Legal education didactics is primarily used in schools and in law as a minor subject at universities.

Law didactics

Since law is not only taught at universities, but also jurisprudence, legal didactics also deals with this sub-area. However, little research has been done so far in this particular perspective; rather, legal didactics are usually equated with legal didactics, especially from the university perspective.

Legal training

Legal didactic issues are traditionally dealt with almost exclusively in the context of legal training , which in Germany means the classic university training to become a fully qualified lawyer. Dealing with legal training is largely limited to curricular and organizational aspects, and from this perspective, legal didactics is usually not restricted as a component, but as a supplement, namely as a thematic focus on teaching-learning methodology. On the other hand, the objection is that both subject areas largely overlap, but that there are legal didactic questions that do not belong to legal training (e.g. didactics of law in the minor subject) and vice versa (e.g. in Germany the need for the second state examination as a prerequisite for Admission to the bar).

Legal education

Legal education as a science of education for law or lawful behavior was seen in the older literature as more comprehensive or superordinate to teaching and learning law, in the current perspective both are separated, so that legal education is to be viewed as complementary to legal didactics.

development

Germany

Since legal and political studies are not of great importance in schools in Germany, the relevant subject didactics have received little attention. In the higher education sector, in the 1960s and 1970s, parallel to the development of general higher education didactics, there was an initial, more intensive preoccupation with didactic issues. However, this has largely remained without consequences, so that discussions have dealt almost exclusively with the training of lawyers.

It is only since around 2010 that a somewhat broader group of university professors with a scientific claim has dealt with legal didactic questions again, which is expressed in regular specialist conferences and scientific publications. However, there is still a lack of broader interest on the part of teachers and, accordingly, greater consideration of legal didactic findings in university teaching. The following research institutes are to be mentioned in particular:

  • Competence center for legal teaching and learning, University of Cologne
  • Institute for Legal Didactics, University of Passau
  • Institute for Legal Didactics and Education, Westphalian University (Recklinghausen)
  • Center for Legal Didactics, University of Hamburg

Development outside of Germany

In continental Europe, legal didactics received just as little attention as in Germany. In Austria, the University of Salzburg has been organizing specialist conferences on legal didactics since 2014. There is hardly any cross-border European exchange; the European Journal of Legal Education, founded in 2004, was discontinued after a few years.

In English-speaking countries, didactic issues (mostly under the umbrella term 'legal education', sometimes also referred to in the narrower sense as 'legal pedagogy') are given more attention, which is reflected in a number of specialist journals.

Literature in Germany

Regular German-language publications:

literature

School:

  • F. Sandmann, Didaktik der Rechtskunde, Paderborn 1975
  • R. Greferath, Didactics of Legal Lessons in General Schools, Weinheim 1994
  • T. Grammes, Communicative Subject Didactics. Politics. History. Law. Wirtschaft, Opladen 1998, p. 443 mw N.

University:

  • B. Bergmans, Fundamentals of Legal Didactics at Universities. Vol. 1: Legal Didactics as Science and Practice, Berlin 2014
  • P. Dyrchs, didactics for lawyers. An Approach to the Art of Legal Teaching, Bielefeld 2013
  • P. Kostorz, Basic Questions in Legal Didactics, Münster / Berlin 2016

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Legal didactics - the self-image of a (new) discipline . Retrieved October 4, 2019.
  2. ↑ Link list of English-language periodicals in the Yearbook of Legal Didactics 2013/2014, pp. 253–254.