The Lifeworld of Law: Methodological Multiplicity in Legal Pedagogy
| Published date | 01 January 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/23220058231178739 |
| Author | Anushka Singh |
| Date | 01 January 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The Lifeworld of Law:
Methodological Multiplicity
in Legal Pedagogy
Anushka Singh1
Abstract
Multidisciplinary studies in the field of law in India in the last two decades or so have gained traction. The
grudging acceptance of insights from social sciences into the technical discipline of law has expanded the
horizon of its study. The presence of insights from other disciplines, however, has not predominantly
altered the approach to legal education in India and they have at best remained alternate modes of legal
analyses juxtaposed with a technical-doctrinal study of law. The methodological challenge is to think
of ways to dovetail the insights to co-produce legal knowledge which is shared across disciplines. This
paper is an attempt in that direction by bringing in a synthesis between the ‘external’ and the ‘internal’
perspectives, arguing in favour of interdisciplinarity as a pedagogical frame. The approach towards
legal pedagogy is heuristic where methodical perspectives are not imparted but demonstrated. This
paper undertakes this task in relation to how criminal law in India can be taught through a case study
on the law of sedition—Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, examining it from three different
perspectives—the doctrinal, the instrumentalist and the constitutivist. The learnings from different
vantage points and the exchange between them create lessons for legal pedagogy.
The trajectory of legal education, which evolved alongside the development of legal schools of thought, has
of the development of legal education in America in the twentieth century, one can nonetheless discern a
pattern that denotes an initial preoccupation with a more formalist approach to the study of law, gradually
looking at law as entirely embedded in society and politics, challenging the formalist claim about law being
graphs, taking into account the argument in its generality, it can be stated that the development of legal
education globally, has navigated between an inward-looking approach with emphasises on law as a
Article
Asian Journal of Legal Education
11(1) 20–35, 2024
© 2023 The West Bengal National
University of Juridical Sciences
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DOI: 10.1177/23220058231178739
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1 School of Law, Governance and Citizenship, Dr B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi, Delhi, India.
Corresponding author:
Anushka Singh, School of Law, Governance and Citizenship, Dr B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi, Delhi, India.
E-mail: anushka@aud.ac.in
Singh 21
discipline of law.2 There are jurisdictional patterns connected to these approaches linked to the question of
the location of law as either a professional discipline or a part of social sciences or humanities. While no
science model dominates the US legal academia, the UK is still believed to be in the transitional phase
where the thrust is still on technical-professional discipline but with momentum towards moving to
to legal profession, with law schools having fewer multidisciplinary faculties as compared to the United
States, where multidisciplinarity has become a norm.3 Methodologically, this evolutionary trajectory has
bifurcated the approach to study law into two: the traditional ‘black-letter’ approach (internal perspective)
associated with legal formalism and legal positivism and the non-conventional multidisciplinary approach
to specific theoretical frames for understanding the law. These perspectives, however, are often seen to be
translating into a binary pair of methods. Arguing against the binary construction, and in favour of
for understanding the relationship between law and society and the role the law performs in society. In doing
constituted simply by bringing in perspectives from other disciplines to study law, but by dovetailing the
between the presence of multidisciplinary accounts of law and a truly interdisciplinary study of law which
disciplines because it is co-produced. Through this frame, the paper makes a plea for interdisciplinary legal
education in India and demonstrates the pedagogical frame of interdisciplinarity, heuristically.
the instrumentalist and the constitutivist. A pure doctrinal form of study is the mainstay of the black-
letter tradition which makes up the internal perspective and argues in favour of the ‘autonomy’ of law
in society.4 The rationale behind adopting these frameworks
2
to dominance of different kinds of legal scholarship within specific countries. For instance, European legal education is viewed by
American legal scholars as still being overreliant on the traditional dogmatic method; on the other hand, many European scholars
see American legal academia as losing touch with legal practice, to become amateur social science, see
eds. (Cambridge University Press
2017), a volume put together with the intention to bridge the methodological divide between European and American legal
scholarship and what is needed is a coming together of legal profession and legal academia with insights from other disciplines
(p. 2). For scholarships that correspond to the view that the editors of the above volume want to contest, see Mathias Reimann,
The American Advantage in Global Lawyering, 78 1 (2014), who have argued that the
continental European countries continue to subscribe to ‘classical’ conceptions of law borrowed from formalist approach whereas
American legal system has adopted a ‘post-classical’ conception of law as more ‘pluralistic, pragmatic and political’ (p. 3).
3 For a comparison between the current state of legal scholarship within the United States, the UK and Germany, see Mathias M.
Siems & Daithi’ Mac Si’Thigh, Mapping Legal Research, 71(3) 651 (2012).
4
and the constitutivist. This work borrows from Zamboni’s models and Sarat and Kerans perspectives, placing them as conceptual
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