Dr. Farah Yassine
Assistant Professor – Kuwait International Law School – Doha – Kuwait

Abstract:

Law is a discipline that changes constantly with societies and follows closely its development. Therefore it should reflect social changes that are nowadays very hard to track. Law is evolving with societies and teaching law should be evolving two. Such evolution canberealized through different ways and many possibilities can be suggested. But basically the shift from pure theory to a more practical approach would be a potential technique to move towards a more modern method of teaching law.
A closer look to the relationship between theory and practice shows that pure theory could not possibly be the only method of teaching. However when teaching law one cannot escape entirely from theoretical teaching methods. Otherwise how can law professors transmit the information to their students? Indeed how can their students acquire the legal knowledge without a theoretical study of the main legal concepts and doctrines? In the same time theory is not enough because it may provide the information but does not create a good jurist. Law graduates are not all jurists. A law graduate might have the information but without the appropriate tools he cannot become a real jurist. The latter is a person who masters the knowledge while having the necessary personal skills. This becomes like a definite attitude towards law and legal issues, because law is one of the few fields that have impact on the personality and attitude of the student, and afterwards on the legal practitioner that he might become.
Difference should be made between a person who knows the law and a jurist. The latter is the one who can think, analyze, and who dares to agree or disagree with the legal theories that he learned or he is still learning. A successful legal practitioner is a person who can think clearly and objectively while being in the skin of the other party whether it was the victim or the prosecutor. A successful legal practitioner is a person who was able to integrate the values, standards, ethics and beliefs associated to law and legal practice. He is a person who acquired a certain “law identity”. In reality if studying law does not affect the personality of the law student, he cannot become a jurist. The aim of teaching law should be to help a student to become this kind of person. This certainly cannot be achieved through traditional learning, or formal learning.
The selected approach for teaching law should combine theory and practice. It should work on the knowledge of the student together with his personality. Stepping away from the exclusive recourse to formal teaching methods is the first requirement to succeed in this approach. Several techniques can be used in order to transmit the information to the students through different means that are mostly innovative, modern and evolving. Some means are already followed in several law schools mainly as alternatives to traditional techniques that could be called “formal education”. On the other hand, non-formal education is a method that takes into account the input of students where they get to participate to the education process. It is an interactive, integrative and collaborative method that gives high value to what students have to say and how they truly think about legal doctrines and concepts. The suggested approach provides sufficient space to the students’ ideas and thinking. Being a faculty member at a law school that highly promotes critical thinking, I could not but give preference to non-formal education which is a new, modern and innovative path for teaching law.

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