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18 J. Legal Educ. 155 (1965-1966)
On Teaching Legal History Backwards

handle is hein.journals/jled18 and id is 167 raw text is: COMME NTS The purpose of this department is to afford an opportunity for informal ex- change of ideas on matters related to legal education. Typical comments will range from about 1200 to about 3000 words in length, and may either advocate innovations in curriculum or teaching method or respond critically to previ- ously published material. As a general rule, the authors will gladly answer in- quiries and, to the extent available, upon request supply copies of materials referred to. ON TEACHING LEGAL HISTORY BACKWARDS MALCOLMZ S. MASON * Scire leges non hoc est verba earum tenere, sedZ v m ac potestatem. Digest, 1.3.17 If I were teaching legal history, I would like to try, one year, teaching it backwards. Why do we teach legal history? One reason, and the reason I consider most important, is because we hope to achieve depth of focus that will aid- understanding of present legal processes and awareness of legal changes now occurring. An effective lawyer today, in any area of moment, must have of course a sense of what the legal system is, but he must also have a sense of what it is becoming, where and in what directions it is moving or capable of movement. Legal history can help to give that awareness. Unfortunately, however, the traditional syllabus tends to create, for all but the luckiest of students, certain distortions in the learning process. Holds- worth remarks that the continuous history of English law began in the year 449 when the Jutes landed in the island of Thanet.' To start there is logical, but the texts are dry and dusty, the facts are dim and misty, the concepts are vague and mystic. A great historian and a great teacher, Julius Goebel accomplished for some of us a bringing out of the sense of relevance of the historical processes in- volved.2 But how great the danger that for most students either the relevance is lost or false conceptions are acquired. To start with the unknown in order to throw light on the known, with the intellectually inaccessible in order to throw light on the readily accessible, is unsound in principle. It takes a student who does not yet have a grasp of what law is, what courts are, what legal policy and practice are, what legal growth is, and lets him form his first and basic notions out of materials that are most in danger of being misunderstood * lember of the New York Bar. 1 WILLWS SEA= HODswonT, SoUnCEs AxD LITERATUE OF ENGLISH LAW 1 (1925). 2See Warren, Julius Goebel, Jr.-An Appreciation, 61 CoL.L.R. 1195 (1961). 155

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