Critical Legal Education As a Subversive Activity

In an age when everyone aspires to teach critical thinking skills in the classroom, what does it mean to be a subversive law teacher? Who or what might a subversive law teacher seek to subvert – the authority of the law, the university, their own authority as teachers, perhaps? Are law students ripe for subversion, agents of, or impediments to, subversion? Do they learn to ask critical questions? Responding to the provocation in the classic book Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Postman and Weingartner, the idea that teaching could, or even should, be subversive still holds true today, and its premise is particularly relevant in the context of legal education. We therefore draw on this classic book to discuss, in the present volume, the consideration of research into legal education as lifetime learning, as creating meaning, as transformative and as developing world-changing thinking within the legal context. The volume offers research into classroom experiences and theoretical and historical interrogations of what it means to teach law subversively. Primarily aimed at legal educators and doctoral students in law planning careers as academics, its insights speak directly to tensions in higher education more broadly.

Helen Gibbon is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law & Justice at the University of New South Wales, Australia, where she is Director of the LLB Program.

Ben Golder is a Professor (and a former Associate Dean of Education) in the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW, Australia. He teaches subjects on legal theory, law and social theory, public law, and the politics of human rights.

Lucas Lixinski is a Professor in the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW, Australia.

Marina Nehme is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law & Justice at UNSW, Australia, and a Fellow of the UNSW Scientia Education Academy.

Prue Vines is Professor of Law in the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW, Australia, and an Emeritus Fellow of the UNSW Scientia Education Academy.