Not for Profit: Why Legal Education Needs the Humanities

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Professor Martha Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, delivers the 2011 Hal Wootten Lecture at UNSW.

About the lecture - "Not for Profit: Why Legal Education Needs the Humanities":
We are in the midst of a worldwide crisis in education in schools and universities. In virtually every nation, the humanities and arts are being eroded in favour of technical applied learning, geared to create short-term profit. These changes have not been well thought through. The humanities and arts are not "high culture", the domain of the elites. Rather, they provide abilities that are essential for responsible citizenship: the ability to think for oneself, deferring neither to tradition nor to authority; to think like a "citizen of the world", understanding global problems in a nuanced manner; to cultivate an empathic imagination and see the world from the perspectives of many types of people. This crisis presents critical challenges for legal education and professional preparation, as the imperatives of profit undermine ethics and the role of law and the denigration of humanistic forms of learning erode the possibility for advancing key attributes of a democratic society.

About Professor Nussbaum:
Professor Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago with appointments in the schools of law and divinity, as well as the philosophy department. A graduate from New York University and Harvard University, she has taught at Harvard, Wellesley College, and Brown University. Professor Nussbaum's recent publications include Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (2011), Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010), and From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (2010).