The essay examines two ideal types of legal thinking that Max Weber develops in relation to continental and English law respectively. By focusing on the differences in the training of lawyers, two corresponding roles can be distinguished for the university jurist: the academic lawyer and the legal academic. The former is a thematic variation of the practitioner and defines the university jurist’s action in relation to the legal profession: her research mainly supports good lawyering or social reform, her educational functions centre on vocational preparation, etcetera. By contrast, the primary affiliations of the legal academic are not legal practitioners but her university colleagues in the humanities and the social sciences with whom she shares a common calling: in an immediate way, to contribute to a better understanding of the social and political world and to further the edification of future professionals. The non-instrumental ethos that the role of the legal academic represents marks the possibility of a radically critical position that is available to the discipline of law if it is understood as a human science.
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