The office of law teacher

Articulating the role of the law teacher as a form of office, this chapter engages with the qualities and duties of that office, focusing in particular on its attendant obligation to be complicit in the reproduction of legal form. Through the curation of a course of legal education, the law teacher oversees the training of individual students into a certain conduct of lawyerly office, amongst other postgraduate roles in society. In this, law is characterised as primarily a form of imaginary cultivation, whereby individuals are inducted into the conceptual strata of legal understanding through the material forms of play encountered on a law degree. The way law teachers conduct their office, then, is a key element in the reproduction of legal and social institutions and the forms of life enabled by educational, legal, and social structures, responsibility for which cannot be avoided by those who occupy the office of law teacher. The office of law teacher is thus not only a site of reproduction but also of potential resistance against harmful legal and social forms.