Rätt och moral: Meningar med skolämnet juridik på gymnasienivå

Law and morality : Meanings with the school subject law at upper secondary level

The overall purpose of the dissertation is to identify discourses in law education at the upper secondary level. The studies include an analytical separation of epistemic, predefined knowledge from non-epistemic, moral meaning making. The studies are focused on the meaningful utterances about purposes, content and teaching methods that may be identified in previous research, curricula, teachers’ speech, textbooks and students’ final papers.

The dissertation takes its departure in both legal and didactic theory. Theories offered by philosophy of law and sociology of law concerning the relationship between law and morality are of particular interest, along with curriculum theory and pragmatism.

Pragmatic discourse analysis has been operationalized for the analyzes. The method starts with the identification and analyzes of meaningful utterances, which are synthesized into discourses. The method ends with reflection on conceivable consequences of the identified discourses.

Five discourses about purposes of law education at the upper secondary level have been identified: (1) The social science discourse, (2) The private utility discourse, (3) The academic discourse, (4) The discourse about business purposes, and (5) The criminological discourse.

A possible consequence of the most prominent academic and social science discourses is teaching in accordance with the progressivist and reconstructivist educational philosophies. Furthermore, a comprehensive central content in the syllabi for law in Gy11 means a re-establishment of the essentialist philosophy of education.

Construction of the subject content in law by a model from sociology of law could make it possible to explicitly relate epistemic knowledge about legal problem-solving to non-epistemic moral meaning making. The model is based om different perspectives on legal questions, both legal and societal norms and practices.