The judge has the ethical obligation to vote neg --- legal education must be framed through the lens of resistance for it to be productive, only our model solves

Following a course of legal education means becoming with power. To be a student of the law is to be—to grow, change, develop, unfold—within the structures of the law school and the legal tradition in which it provides training. These structures govern the learning subject and condition the forms of life that such education produces or enables, both with respect to individual students and the wider social contexts they go on to populate. But law, and its study, is an area of human and intellectual endeavour oriented around the legitimate exercise of authority—querying not only the structure of legal regulation but the manner in which it can be deployed and administered to produce justice in the governance of community. In many renditions, law is not merely about the promulgation of power (although that is something law can enable) and thus its education is not merely the memorisation of rules as the expression of static forms of authority. More fundamentally, law is—or, perhaps, should be—about questioning and seeking to ensure the legitimacy of the way power is exercised, and its education about developing the tools required for such conduct.

Law governs through structure, delineating the multifarious ways in which life takes shape, facilitating the formation, maintenance, and variation of lawful relations. Law is thus often a question of the relationship between the structures of power and the conduct of individuals—as either subjects or agents of power, or both. To learn the law is doubly concerned with power: if we accept—in line with critical pedagogies such as those of Paulo Freire or Jacques Derrida—that pedagogy is always an exercise of power in itself, then to teach is to control or direct, or at least influence, the intellectual exposure and journey of learners (including teachers). It is to manage the backgrounding and foregrounding of knowledge and experience, and the concomitant patterning of the learning subject into certain habits of mind and ways of working with legal and other materials, as well as into different institutional structures and modes of (lawyerly) life.

Legal education is not about memorising regulations, but about training for governance—for the care of the social, economic, cultural, and political effects of the positions taken up by law students as they move through their subsequent careers, within and beyond the expressly legal institution. Legal education is also a form of governance, a relation of power in itself—a governance of the minds and development of students (and teachers-as-students). As such, legal education—like other areas of pedagogy—is always in tension with those that are governed. As Foucault frames it, power always operates through agonistic relations:

At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential freedom [against which power defines itself], it would be better to speak of an ‘agonism’—of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle, less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation.1

To study law, then, is not simply to be subjected to legal knowledge as a docile student body. Students are not blank canvasses waiting for pre-determined legal knowledge to be inscribed upon them. To follow a course of legal education is to be exposed to the pedagogic power of the law school—and to become in an agonistic relation to it. To be a law student is to resist the law school. And law teachers, too, dwell in resistance to the structures that govern academic endeavour, including the resistant power of law students and other governmental and managerial technologies that surround, hold, delimit, and structure experience and condition the agency of teachers, scholars, and students alike.