Law & Lounge: An Experiment on student self-organization and critique as skeptical reflexivity

Abstract

This contribution reports upon an ongoing experiment that aims at contributing to the academic development of law students at Utrecht University. It does so from the perspective of legal and social theory. The experiment contains a type of learning in which students reflect critically upon ready legal knowledge, based on the study and discussion of fundamental and primary texts that provide a theoretical framework for this knowledge. This type of learning is characterized by self-organization in the sense that students are responsible themselves as to how the class meetings are conducted and the insights gained. In section 2, I report upon the experiment and describe how the experiment has been developed in three phases. I first explain the assumptions that led to developing the experiment and describe the set-up of the experiment in its initial appearance. I then summarize the conclusions drawn from my own observations. Subsequently, I report upon the follow-up of the experiment in its second and third guises, and summarize the findings that came out of the student evaluations. In section 3, the experiment is placed against the background of the meaning of academic development. In essence, I understand legal academic learning as learning to know the law, having the skills to work with the law and, fundamentally here, the ability to reflect critically upon the law and its use (why is the law the way it is and could or should it be different?). De Vries experiments with student self-organisation and the reading of fundamental texts, with an aim to open up his students’ critical potential. In doing so, he urges for a critical attitude that is reflexive, in the sense that there is a task to uncover the self-evident assumptions in how we understand law in order to judge whether society demands a reconsideration of law’s foundational principles.