Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo's work provides a comparative and historical account of legal education in the Western world, from ancient Rome to the present day. Following the traditional division of comparative law, it addresses both the civil and common law traditions, focusing on changes in legal education over the centuries and the interrelations between the two traditions in contemporary times.
Adopting a longue durée perspective, the book presents itself as an 'introduction to a cultural and comparative history of the law' (1), and it achieves its purpose. Alongside the historical analysis of legal education through its main features, the book examines the interactions between legal education and its social and intellectual context, also focusing on 'the social role of the most important legal actors' (1) - legal professionals.
This work demonstrates that legal education is, and has always been, inseparable from the ideas and concepts of law, its historical development and its social function. Law possesses a constitutive social force.' It has been a factor in the ordering and disciplining of society. Legal education, in turn, 'is linked to the law as a way of ordering society and to the conceptualisation of the law itself' (1), playing a significant social role.
Pérez-Perdomo's work goes further, aiming to clarify the role of legal education in organising law and maintaining legal tradition. This methodological approach defines the first chapter of the book, which addresses the civil law tradition. The chapter's primary aim is to demonstrate the relationship between legal education and the conception of law, from classical Rome to Justinian. It outlines the gradual development of the legal field and the organisation of methods for legal knowledge and its transmission. These points are discussed particularly with reference to the opinions of the jurisconsults, which structured legal knowledge and contributed to the transformation of the legal field in response to the changing needs of Roman society. Legal education, in turn, reflected the prevailing concept of law. And 'once the law was consolidated as an intellectual discipline' (11), legal education subsequently assumed a more formal character.
The work then examines the changes that occurred under Justinian's rule. The promulgation of the Corpus Iuris Civilis significantly altered the concept of law, which became identified exclusively with the written document sanctioned by political authority. As a result, the author argues, law became detached from […]
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DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2049677X.2026.2671641
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