One Thing I Wish Law Students Knew: Law Doesn't Exist In A Vacuum

The law is an interesting thing. On the one hand, it comprises a system of formal rules and expectations that regulate social behaviour with the express goal of maintaining "social order" (however critically one decides to examine that term). In many ways, the law provides a framework for organising social life, resolving disputes and governing various forms of human-to-human, and human-to-non-human, relationships, including—and perhaps more importantly—the relationship between the individual and the State.

But the law is also a social fact. These rules and norms did not emerge from nowhere. They were, in fact, written by people (mostly privileged men) decades ago and continue to be bolstered by institutions governed by prevailing social, cultural and political norms.

Seen in that way, the law is not neutral. After all, what one group might consider to constitute "social order" may very well be experienced as social exclusion by another. Take, for example, Dalit communities in India, whose oppression was historically justified through a regime organised around notions of purity and pollution. Therefore, what Dalit communities experienced as oppression was, for many Savarna caste groups, simply the maintenance of "social order".

Or take the example of queer communities around the world, who continue to be pushed to the margins of society by legal regimes that justify their exclusion in the name of preserving "social order", "public morality" and/or "traditional values"—values that many in the heterosexual community continue to hold dear.

The law, therefore, does not simply regulate society; it is itself both a product of and a participant in the construction of our shared social reality. Our statutes and judicial doctrines can therefore be seen as vestiges of both the historical moments that produced them and present conditions that continue to sustain them. The study of law, then, cannot simply be a study of rules and doctrines. It must also be the study of the people who wrote the law, those who were ignored by them, and the worlds that ended up being created as a result of this. In fact, the law can very well be conceptualized as a gateway to understanding entire social universes— real and imagined (think: historical legal fiction)!

And this is why I find it deeply disconcerting that many law students (and even some practising lawyers) continue to hold onto a myopic understanding of the law; one that is divorced from the people and institutions that shaped it—under the pretence of holding onto an ideal of "neutrality" (as if the law could ever be neutral when the people who wrote it were not).

I would therefore urge law students to spend more time engaging with the works of sociologists, anthropologists, historians, economists, political theorists, gender scholars and others (even if doing so is not part of their prescribed law school syllabus) so as to broaden one’s understanding of the possibilities that exist beyond the law and the many worlds that the law simultaneously produces.

Sociology, for example, teaches us to think critically about power and the ways in which it is produced, distributed and reproduced through our institutions. So, while a lawyer may accept the Constitution as a natural starting point of legal analysis, a sociologist may first ask: why a written Constitution at all? What purpose does it serve? And what forms of power does it enable, legitimise and constrain?

These disciplines ask questions that lawyers often miss and allow us to interrogate the very foundations upon which our institutions rest. Foundations such as the family, the market and the nation-state that lawyers often take for granted (though how any man-made construct can ever be considered "given" is beyond me) are viewed with far greater scepticism by the other social sciences—and rightly so. If law students indeed aspire to be critical thinkers, this is one way to go about it.

In fact, to go beyond bare Acts and into the "why" behind the law is also where the magic of legal education actually happens. You either fall in love with the law as a result (as I have), or begin to resent parts of it (as I occasionally do as well!). But either way, you develop a much deeper, more intimate appreciation of the power that that law commands on our daily lives.

And that is why, in my view, a well-rounded legal education ought to bring the law into conversation with the other social sciences—disparate as some subjects may be—in ways that are substantive, so as to ensure that students are better able to understand not only what the law is, but also what it ought to be.