Legal History and Legal Education

Abstract

The article discusses why and under which conditions legal history is a central, formative subject for future lawyers. The Author’s point is that the utility of history in legal education is fully distinct of that of dogmaticmatters. Actually, while dogmatic legal education aims to fabricate certainties about contemporary law, conferring upon it rational / technical evidence, legal history renders problematic the implicit assumptions of dogmatics, namely, the rational, necessarily ultimate nature of our law. Therefore, legal history accomplishes this mission stressing the fact that law is necessarily bound to a cultural (in the deepest sense of the word) environment and, furthermore, that legal knowledge is also a »local knowledge« whose categories are deeply rooted in historical epistemes.