Call for Papers — “Two Hundred Years of Law Schools in Brazil: Empirical Research and Critical Perspectives on Legal Education”

The special issue takes as its starting point the debate on the so-called “crisis of legal education,” historically associated with critiques of dogmatism, technicism, and elitism in legal training. It seeks to examine how legal education has been transformed by university expansion, affirmative action policies, changes in higher education funding, and the emergence of new critical agendas, including scholarship on race and law, feminist thought, queer critique, and decolonial thought.

Rather than returning to a generic diagnosis of crisis, the special issue proposes to investigate how these transformations have concretely reshaped legal education, across its methodological, epistemological, and theoretical dimensions, with particular attention to the consolidation of empirical legal research and to the study of legal education as a field of practices, disputes, and pedagogical experiences.

REED invites researchers to submit articles addressing this agenda of empirical renewal in the study of legal education. We welcome completed or ongoing research that examines the implications of critical approaches for legal education or presents experiences that diversify and rethink teaching and learning practices in law, including comparative perspectives involving other countries.

The special issue also welcomes research on how racism, sexism, and other mechanisms of power shape legal education; on the rise of authoritarianism and its effects on scientific production in the field of law; and on teaching and extension experiences that have developed innovative resources, methodologies, and tools for legal education.