Challenges for teaching interaction skills for law students

Abstract

Are lawyers witty courtroom heroes or professionals working with and for people? Is law only universal judgements and afterthoughts or could it also be preventive and proactive individual planning and dialogue? The traditional legal education could be seen to have been based on the first assumptions. The course “Interaction skills for lawyers”, in the Faculty of Law at the University of Helsinki (Finland), evolves instead from the latter assumptions. In this article we relate our starting points in planning the course and evaluate our challenges and experiences in developing it.     

Partnership in Love and in Business

This article ponders the influences ofthe dichotomous nature of our understanding law andto questions that starting point on different levels oflegal thinking.The purpose of law is to make rules for our socialbehaviour but there are no specific images of humanbeings behind law. When there are no defined images,subconscious cultural images shape our thinkingsometimes even without our realizing it, and withoutserious discussion. The division between family andthe market has to do with gender divisions as well aswith the division between family and contract law. Thelogic and human image behind these two branches of lawis different.Even if we may behave differently in differentsituations we do not become altogether differentkinds of human beings with different values when wechange surroundings. Thus, we might instead develop asa starting point human co-operation law where familyand business partnerships are seen as specialbranches. The starting point of this co-operation lawwould be many-sided and pluralistic human beings, who would be atthe same time loving and egotistic, communal andindividual, feminine and masculine. Such human beingsmay be regarded as multicoloured instead of white orblack.