The alternative is cultural legal studies as an alternative form of understanding the rationalities of law.

This chapter reflects upon our experiences teaching Cultural Legal Studies as an elective subject in the context of a legal education that generally inculcates hierarchy, orients students towards formalistic reasoning that privileges one answer rather than many, and indoctrinates students into the ways of reading texts that are linear and rational.1 In Cultural Legal Studies, students encounter diverse representational forms—films, comics, images and other cultural artefacts—and analyse them according to the tools of interpretation derived from the humanities. In doing so, they see how legal narratives of rights, responsibility, and subjectivity are bound up in stories of justice, revenge, and culpability. They witness how cultural forms both embody and challenge the tenets of liberal legalism, ‘making strange’ law’s narratives of neutrality, certainty, and reliability.2 The process of developing their own readings of cultural legal texts empowers students to reflect upon their own complicity in, and responsibility for, the legal forms through which they engage and exert agency.

Unlike traditional law and literature courses, Cultural Legal Studies as we have taught it has been built around the particular encounter (filmic, televisual, ludic, graphic) with a jurisprudence of popular culture.3 This is not limited to literature or films dealing explicitly with law and justice. Rather it is a practice of reading texts jurisprudentially and is grounded in a jurisprudential tradition—a way of teaching theory. Cultural Legal Studies is thus a course in legal theory. But it is law as stories, reflecting upon the way that, in law school, we both inhabit and inculcate legal imaginaries which are intelligible to us through images, symbols, and narratives. By starting with the imaginary, Cultural Legal Studies provides ways to visualise the biopolitical frames that govern our teaching of sovereignty, justice, rights, authority, violence, and the modern legal subject.4 Such an approach foregrounds the ways in which legality is constituted through the cultural narratives in which we imagine our lives. This enables students to analyse their investments in, and imaginative attachments to, particular kinds of thinking about law, legality, and justice. It also provides them with training that is particularly apposite for legal education—learning how to speak and write the language of the law.5 In its blend of cinematic texts and legal theory, and its emphasis on the creative act of making arguments, teaching Cultural Legal Studies becomes a way of pursuing legal pluralism that empowers students to think about their own positionality, power, and privilege as normative agents.6

This chapter is split into four sections. The first provides the contextual background and focus of our reflection in three regards: the neoliberalisation of university legal education and the emergence of the ‘student consumer’; the emphasis on the threshold concept of ‘thinking like a lawyer’; and a critique of an overly narrow perspective on what legal education is. The second section provides a brief outline of the field of Cultural Legal Studies. This provides the basis for the third section, which focuses on our approach and experience in teaching Cultural Legal Studies and how it provides opportunities to challenge aspects of the neoliberalisation of legal education as the production of biopolitical subjects. We then conclude by considering what a cultural legal approach to teaching law more broadly might encompass.