Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s main arguments, themes, and methodology of inquiry. Particular attention is paid to the key-notions at the centre of the book, i.e. ‘scientia iuris’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘experience’. In so doing, the chapter also argues that the crisis that legal education and practice are undergoing is not an isolated, or accidental, event. It is, rather, an instance of the broader phenomenon of ‘the radical intellectualization of … life’ (Ernst Cassirer). The chapter explains that the intellectualisation of life is a normative phenomenon through which we turn experience into knowledge by assigning intelligible meaning to whatever we encounter in life. The purpose of this meaning-assigning endeavour is to order the world. For as we order it, we avoid falling prey to the anxieties and fears that our factical finitude and a chaotic existence generate (‘chaos’ meaning, not incidentally, ‘abyss’ in Greek). The chapter supports this argument by establishing an analytical link between ‘scientia iuris’ origins and development to date, and Prometheus Bound as a theatrical representation of the overcoming of the anxieties and fears which experience’s finitude generates with the reassuring (i.e. rational and epistemic) decoding and management of life. Thereafter, the chapter presents several accounts that outline the difficulties which legal education and practice are currently facing in both Civil and Common law jurisdictions; discusses a few themes relating to the spreading of artificial intelligence into the legal domain; and outlines some potential objections that might be raised against the book’s arguments and methodology.