The Moral Imagination and the Legal Life: Beyond Text in Legal Education

What role can resources that go beyond text play in the development of moral education in law schools and law firms? How can these resources - especially those from the visual and performing arts - nourish the imagination needed to confront the ethical complexities of particular situations? This book asks and answers these questions, thereby introducing radically new resources for law schools and law firms committed to fighting against the moral complacency that can all too often creep into the life of the law. The chapters in this volume build on the companion volume, The Arts and the Legal Academy, also published by Ashgate, which focuses on the role of non-textual resources in legal education generally. Concentrating in particular on the moral dimension of legal education, the contributors to this volume include a wide range of theorists and leading legal educators from the UK and the US.

Contents: Introduction, Zenon Bankowski and Maksymilian Del Mar; The space to see: law and the ethical imagination, Zenon Bankowski; The education of attention and encounter in the legal academy, Maksymilian Del Mar; On encountering life and learning with/out the text: reflections on Bankowski and Del Mar, Julian Webb; A university is not the world: and nor is its law school, Anthony Bradney; 'Associated life': democratic professionalism and the moral imagination, Paul Maharg; Challenging the primacy of the text: the role of the visual in legal education, Clare Sandford-Couch; Twyla Tharp goes to law school: on the use of the visual and performing arts in professional education, Thomas Wm. Mayo; Truth in context: sketching a (new) historicist legal pedagogy, Randy Gordon; Performance, pedagogy and law: theatre of the oppressed in the law school classroom, Gillian Calder; Index.