Abstract
The article is divided into three parts. In the first part, I describe three of the most frequent answers to the question of why is it necessary, important, or urgent for technological innovation to be incorporated into law schools? The first two answers are directly related to agents of the market that demand legal education: law students and law firms. On the one hand, the legal literature that deals with this issue argues that law schools must innovate in technological matters to meet the expectations and needs of the new generations of law students. On the other hand, the literature argues that this aim should be achieved to satisfy the expectations and needs of law firms, who are the ones that hire new law school graduates. The third response indicates that technological innovation in law schools is necessary because it allows students to achieve learning objectives more effectively. In the second part, I offer a critique of the first two answers, those that react and want to meet the needs both of the legal services market and the educational services market. This critique is based on a Heideggerian interpretation of technology. In the third part, I present my critiques of the third answer, which closely connects the pedagogical aims of legal education and technological innovation. In this section of the essay I argue that the third answer (i) is weakened by the naturalistic fallacy; (ii) it does not support empirically its conclusions, or at least does not support them sufficiently, and it presents some of its empirical arguments as absolute, when there is no consensus in the legal, scientific, or pedagogical communities around them; (iii) it does not offer precise and detailed arguments that show how technological innovation may allow us to fulfill the objectives that legal education usually pursues; and (iv) it obscures the connection between technology and power in legal education.
Keywords
Legal education; technological innovation; Heidegger; criticism of technology; power and technology