What will become of the science of law?

By Fernando Rodríguez de Almeida

I remember good fortune preachers, when the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, said that times of solitude would rebuild the notions we had about life, and that what followed would be the new. But when I heard it, more so because they talk about positivity, I thought they were saying the consequences would be good.

During this gloomy period of contemporary history, education had to adapt, and simultaneous transmission of online classes was one alternative, and the other was virtual activities, and distance learning methods. And finally, those of us who have survived, are left alive to talk about the future.

The problem revealed by the post-pandemic future, whose reflection may have drowned out the almost natural sense of survival of capital, which notices ease in economic results and never catches on.

Just when we thought it was obvious to everyone that distance education has diminished the benefits, not only in pedagogical and educational terms, but also in terms of interpersonal relations, career coexistence, vocational guidance and even humanistic training, in fact, what we saw was distance education gaining traction. And now, he no longer even needs to list supposedly democratic education, which, in fact, is just a private and profitable substitute for the state’s ineffectiveness in public access to education. But until now that was not necessary, now the pressure to preserve the digital system is a common imposition of the large educational conglomerates.

In the Faculty of Law there was great resistance, of course, on the part of teachers, OAB and institutions that still believed in the intellectual training of legal personnel. But little by little, blended learning arrived, almost like a warning from the future, and a professor, highly specialized, academic by training, inserted into the legal world, with attention to bibliography, in-depth reading and discussion inside classes of 30 students, was expensive compared to a specialty teacher, and which now follows the text of the handout, which condenses and outlines thousands of concepts, subtracts depth, alters the weight of learning, and, essentially, is no longer responsible for 30, but for 300 academics, faceless and nameless academics who are worth only an hour of lecture in their colossal backlog. And how do we fight it? Why book if there is charity? Why teach a professor in a particular discipline if there is a group teacher who attends several courses? Why is it so difficult to learn if there is memory to memorize? Why debate if controversy can be avoided in a virtual room without a voice?

Of course, the law school was born in Brazil “crooked”, wanting to cover the “demands”. The Faculty of Law of Olinda and the Faculty of Law of Largo São Francisco, the first to offer a course of law in Brazil in 1827, had already the aim of forming so-called “state cadres”, however, the intellectuals present in these locals would not even understand what it was The Bulletin, after all, was intended as the 60-volume Pontes de Miranda Private Law Treaty to break down one area of ​​law rather than provide a comprehensive picture.

But the body tends to inertia, and if it is to facilitate what is wrong? Now, the problem is that the state itself may not have realized that in times when democracy has become a dialectical game in the mouths of those who reduce it to almost nothing, the intellectuals who have not succumbed to abstraction are those who still care about this concept, and law is the field that constitutes A fundamental pillar of democracy. If the same jurists of the near future are going to be talking about human rights, institutions, access to justice, and other very important issues based on conservation schemes, perhaps history won’t even be able to tell us what will happen to us, after all, history has too many messages. .

Photo: Freepik

Fernando Rodríguez de Almeida holds a PhD in Legal Sciences and a Master’s degree in State Theory and Law; Professor of Philosophy of Law and Constitutional Law. Law course coordinator at Faculdade Maringá.