Overcoming the Boundaries of Legal Education: How to Make Sense of the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has confronted most Universities, and in partic-ular Universities in Continental Europe, with the necessity to critically revise some of the most traditional aspects of legal education. This paper argues that we strongly need to overcome two forms of “isolation” that characterized the orthodox model of legal education: (a) territorial isolation, deriving from the idea that the law that has to be taught and learnt is primarily the law of the territory; (b) methodological isolation, represented by the idea of a necessary cleavage between law and its environment. The pandemic experience, among other factors, has put such elements under strain, insofar as it abolished the physical borders through the massive recourse to digital technologies (platforms for legal education and open access) and the methodological ones as a result of the increasing resort to the law as an instrument of social gover-nance in a time of emergency. The pandemic may be a trigger for a more humanist form of legal education, one that locates the law—to recall a famous essay by Justice Kasirer—within the dimension of the “cosmos”, rather than that of the “empire”.