April 16, 2018

Law, Justice, and Citizenship in the Twenty First Century

António Casimiro Ferreira e João Pedroso

The present doctoral thesis has as object of study the teaching of the graduate degree in Law from the Coimbra Faculty of Law (FDUC). The subject of this research is interdisciplinary, involving sociology, law and education. Initially, I carried out an analysis of the mutations in higher education and in the legal professions, in order to understand the impact of these changes on legal education. Universities, as well as legal services, in the context of hegemonic globalization, have become progressively into a market. I developed three models of legal education (classical, critical/post-critical and global), which served to analyze the legal education in the United States of America, France and Portugal, mainly in the Coimbra Faculty of Law. The legal education was also studied through the perspective of social reproduction. Methodologically, the following research techniques were used: documentary analysis; interviews with nineteen teachers and two students and participant observation in eight curricular units. In relation to the field research, I conducted an analysis of the teaching of law in the FDUC throughout history, from the Pombaline Reform to the present, with a focus on the educational codes: curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation. As a result, one can realize that the teaching of law in the FDUC has been consolidated, throughout time, as mostly a classical legal education. In the 21st century, the great challenge of Portuguese higher education was the Bologna Process. The Bologna Reform, which initially aimed at creating an European higher education area, went beyond European borders. This reform has altered, in some aspects, the teaching of the Law degree of FDUC. Some legal areas were highlighted in the post-Bologna curriculum, such as those related to International Law and Financial Law, at the expense of curricular units of Public Law and interdisciplinary chairs. In terms of pedagogy, the division of classes between theoretical and practical remained in most of the disciplines analyzed in post-Bologna. The Bologna Process also failed to change the FDUC evaluation system, because the most part of the teachers interviewed and observed continue to use the final exam as the only form of evaluation. Finally, I conducted a case study of the Family and Minors Law course in the 2011/2012 school year, in which it was verified that this discipline has little relation with other knowledge outside the Law and even with other legal areas. In this discipline, the civil law of the family predominates, focusing on marriage. In this investigation, it was also observed the absence or shortage of current topics of Family Law. Concerning the FDUC Family and Minors Law classes, one notices that teaching changes even more slowly than the changes in family legislation and families in the Portuguese society.

Key-words: legal education; mutations; curriculum; pedagogy; evaluation.