Teaching Legal Theory in a Crowded (and Uncrowded) Curriculum

Abstract

This article examines the challenges and opportunities of teaching legal theory, focusing on the dual dynamics of a curriculum that can feel both crowded and uncrowded. Here, ‘crowding’ refers not only to excess content and competing demands within the classroom, but also to the broader institutional and disciplinary pressures that shape how legal theory is positioned and experienced within the law degree. Conversely, an ‘uncrowded’ curriculum may not always feel spacious or generative, but can instead appear marginal, thin, or disconnected from the core of legal education. Legal theory exemplifies this tension. It occupies a distinctive place in the law curriculum, inviting students to interrogate foundational questions about the concepts and institutions of law, justice, and power, and the nature of those questions themselves, while also tending to occupy an isolated position within the degree, with ongoing questions about its identity and rationale. Drawing on existing scholarship and the author’s own teaching experience, this paper identifies the central sources of crowding and uncrowding, including the inherited canon, changing patterns of student engagement associated with Gen Z cohorts, pressures for inclusivity, and the risks generative artificial intelligence poses to traditional assessment. It presents strategies to create conceptual and practical spaciousness, emphasising approaches that position students as active participants in theorising, critique, and ‘worldmaking’. It also seeks to ground the discipline, not through its content or a fixed set of methods, but through its overarching purpose and approach to inquiry. In doing so, it explores how legal theory can remain intellectually rigorous and professionally formative, while also pedagogically creative in response to changing conditions.