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Böning, Anja --- "Academic education and socialization" [2016] ELECD 966; in van Klink, Bart; de Vries, Ubaldus (eds), "Academic Learning in Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016) 58

Book Title: Academic Learning in Law

Editor(s): van Klink, Bart; de Vries, Ubaldus

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781784714888

Section: Chapter 4

Section Title: Academic education and socialization

Author(s): Böning, Anja

Number of pages: 21

Abstract/Description:

The discussion on legal educational matters reveals an odd discrepancy: On the one side it represents a ‘long runner’ regarding legal and education policy matters, whilst on the other side it could hardly have attracted scientific interest in the past. So, up to this point, law students’ socialization still describes a rather poorly illuminated subject matter. Topics such as socialization and discipline within educational institutions are regarded as subjects classically attributed to educational science or sociology. According to Brun-Otto Bryde the timidity to look (or to let someone look) closer at legal education’s very own formation praxis can be attributed to its refusal to deal with the factual status quo of law studies, in order to protect it from a possible delegitimation. In Hans-Werner Prahl’s research papers, which deal with university examinations, this point is argued in a similar way. According to Prahl, examinations represent rule and authority and sciences stabilize them by tabooing academic exams themselves. The current state of research regarding educational, learning and socialization processes in law studies is also unsatisfactory, because university socialization still is a relatively unexplored research area. This particularly regards the university daily routine and examination practices of various study subjects. Questions such as how to characterize the social formation program in law, how students deal with the legal habitus, and in what kind of appropriation processes it amalgamates with individual biographies and dispositions remain most widely unexplained.