午夜剧场

My affiliation is not with a Faculty of Law. Naturally, the students do not come solely to study law. I am in charge of an introductory law lecture for first-year students in such a faculty. The lecture content includes how to read the Six Codes (compendium of laws), and I intend to teach them carefully from the basics. "The Arabic numerals within each article are called 'paragraphs,' and the kanji numerals are called 'items.'" "If 'provided, however,' appears in an article, the part before it is called the 'main clause' and the part after it is called the 'proviso,'" and so on. Good, I thought, now they should have no trouble taking full-scale law subjects. With that in mind, I asked a question on the final exam where the Six Codes were permitted: "Quote the main clause of Article X, Paragraph Y of the Civil Code." However, the performance was quite poor. It seems that when they hear "main clause," they colloquially think it refers to the entire text of that section. Should I simply dismiss this as a lack of study on the students' part?

Looking back, I was never taught how to read legal provisions when I was a student in the Faculty of Law. When did I become able to read them? I believe that reading the Six Codes is not something to be acquired as knowledge, but rather something to be mastered as a skill. Looking back again, many of my professors during my undergraduate days would open the Six Codes themselves, point out the articles to be referenced, and often read them aloud. As an inexperienced student, I felt they should just quote them in the handouts if necessary, but they were actually teaching us how to read the provisions by standing alongside the students. In fact, that is how I naturally became able to read them. To convey a skill rather than knowledge, repetitive practice is effective. If so, what I need as a teacher is a class where I demonstrate the practice of reading the Six Codes, even while students look on with annoyance.

I feel that part of the expertise learned at a university resides in such skills and sensitivity to wording. Even if one is in an environment far from their specialty after graduation, it is as hard to forget as riding a bicycle. Any decent law student would pay attention to the difference between a "judgment" and a "ruling" in a trial, and could not help but feel a sense of unease at the phrase "the defendant in a civil lawsuit."

On the other hand, skills and sensitivities are difficult for outsiders to see. Especially now, as expertise becomes increasingly specialized and research becomes globalized, the barriers to dialogue between academic fields are rising. One of the benefits of teaching law in a non-Faculty of Law is the ability to inevitably visualize the skills and sensitivities that are taken for granted in legal studies. There is much for legal scholars to learn from the environment of a non-Faculty of Law.