Notes on Law Study (1969)

The Notes on Law Study were written by David E. Matz in May 1969.

The essence of a...fundamental attraction that [Archibald] MacLeish found in the law lies in his statement: "What law tries to do is to impose on the disorder of experience, the kind of order which enables us to live with the disorder of experience." From this one may infer a most powerful justification for including law in undergraduate study, a justification that grows directly from Hampshire's most fundamental commitment: to study man's efforts to be more fully human. A proper study of the field of law would find many of man's efforts in this direction nowhere more clearly or comprehensively charted. By focusing both explicitly and implicitly on the enduring themes that appear in the legal process, Hampshire can provide the kind of emphasis that is most appropriate to an undergraduate curriculum. Clearly, as will be seen below, this approach cannot eliminate concern for "how the system works", but instead frames that concern so that the basic issues are ones of value, conflict, and resolution. More specifically, law should be included in the curriculum for three related reasons:


 * Particularly in this country, law has been the battleground for some of man's longest-playing tensions: between stability and change, between freedom and security, between history and logic, between justice as man conceives it ideally and justice as man is able to effectuate it. It is the place where man has most publicly tried to define in practice his sense of fairness, his sense of responsibility, his sense of enterprise.
 * Law is certainly not the only place these themes appear in the culture, and many of them are treated only partially in the legal materials. But nowhere are they treated as concretely, as immediately, as decisively, as they are in the law. The importance of this derives not only from the accessibility of the issues for study, but also from the intellectual craftmanship displayed by practitioners working on hard problems that must be solved...
 * The third advantage to the study of law is that the problems faced are so voluminously and articulately documented. Opinions, briefs, court transcripts, statutes, legislative history: all are primary source material available on the public record. The main point, however, is that the law has dealt not only with decisions, but with the reasons for them. Fundamental aspects of the judicial process, including the appellate machinery and the adversary system, work toward a full explication of the grounds for decision. Although full explication can never be achieved, no judge or lawyer can hide from a careful investigator of a full case record the values, biases, and limitations of the people involved. (p.8-10)

If one accepts these justifications for inclusion as adequate, the next question deals with the method of teaching law in college. Indicated above is the tentative conclusion that lawyers and law scholars have not formed and used concepts in quite the way practitioners of academic disciplines do. One inference from this might be that the proper approach would emphasize the use of academic disciplines to study legal phenomena, with lawyers called on as primary source material, to report what happens in the legal system. Certainly many academic scholars use the law this way, but this may well be a serious error for an undergraduate college. The way lawyers and judges think in their profession may not fall under the heading of "conceptual inquiry" as Franklin Patterson uses that term in The Making of a College, but it has been a powerful and effective mode of thought, and--more relevantly--it is integrally bound to the way law operates and therefore to an understanding of law. Thus one or more legal scholars with experience as counsellors and/or judges should play a major role in the design and effectuation of a law program. (p.11)

Notes on Law Study might appropriately close with a caveat: the approach suggested in this paper is intended to be a contribution to general education, not a special preparation for law school. Though the references to the case method and the quote from MacLeish show points of overlap between these categories, their purposes are ultimately different. Hampshire will respect those differences. (p.15)