SF part two: " The law is surely a practice but it is also a subject"

這篇文章，回答了之前一位律師要求我們改變的問題，同時也回答了一位（或一些）同學對於我「教學」的期待。

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/teaching-law/

"...But the mere rehearsing of those arguments, strategies and rules will be an empty gesture if underlying the rehearsal is not some strong intuition of the general project that calls them forth. In his book “Speech Acts,” the philosopher John Searle makes a distinction between brute and institutional facts. Were you to describe a football game in purely brute physicalist terms — a person tries to move forward and is stopped by several other persons; two men in striped shirts run out with a chain suspended between two sticks that are placed in the ground — the description, Searle observes, would tell you nothing about what is really going on."

"That understanding is what law schools offer (among other things). Law schools ask and answer the question, “What’s the game here?”; the ins and outs of the game you learn later, as in any profession. The complaint reported by David Segal in his Times article is that law firms must teach their new hires tricks of the trade they never learned in their contracts, torts and (God forbid) jurisprudence classes. But learning the tricks would not amount to much and might well be impossible for someone who did not know — in a deep sense of know — what the trade is and why it is important to practice it."