Aspiration and Reality in Legal Education

Drawing on interviews with law professors, course details, teaching materials, and assessment questions, Sandomierski identifies a disjunction between law teachers' stated belief in the importance of policy, politics, context, and indeterminacy in understanding law and how they describe legal reasoning and what is actually taught. Sandomierski illuminates, in a wonderfully lucid manner, the problems and possibilities of broadening legal education, of implementing public-spirited visions of legal education, and of the redemption of legal professionalism.

- David Sugarman, Law School, Lancaster University

Offering an effective account of the contemporary state of legal education in English Canada, Aspiration and Reality in Legal Education uses evidence drawn from commercially published casebooks, interviews, as well as careful analysis from course documents, syllabi, and evaluations, to reveal a deep truth about legal education, one that we should all recognize, but one that is never discussed with such clarity.

- Daniel Jutras, Faculty of Law, McGill University

Sandomierski's engaging and provocative book encourages all stakeholders - students, teachers, practitioners, judges, and the general public - to think critically about what is being taught both explicitly and implicitly about contract law in Canada's law schools.

- Richard Devlin, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University

Sandomierski's fascinating book is an anthropology of divided selves: Canadian law professors who teach law as a formal system while most of them subscribe to anti-formalist views. This careful, detailed, brilliantly written book is a case study in how common-sense views of law are reproduced and transmitted.

- Robert W. Gordon, Stanford and Yale Law Schools

This volume puts Canadian legal education squarely into the middle of international scholarly discussions of whether law schools can train lawyers effectively while also serving as centres for theoretical progress on issues of law, justice, and civic values. It is a must-read book for anyone interested in these questions.

- Elizabeth Mertz, Law School, University of Wisconsin-Madison