The semester has started, so I’ve been busier these last few weeks. Law school schedules vary depending on someone’s university here in Germany, but at mine, there just seem to be too many lectures in every semester, ridiculously so. I am definitely not lazy, but ramming together various legal fields that require much more careful and time-consuming study is not… very effective. It would be equally ridiculous to force everyone to study even longer, of course. A sensible solution would be to stop requiring students to know absolutely everything within a format where this is only attainable on a superficial level, and instead, allow for more specializations. Pragmatically allowing us to cut at least some parts out of the schedule would help. The grand finale of the Staatsexamen, which is basically the only thing that matters in the end, forces us to know everything, though. So this would have to be changed as well.
I’ve mentioned the word “pragmatic”, and that is linked to the precise problem that prevents any such changes: People in the field of legal education at universities are anything but pragmatic. Any form of specialization would tarnish their revered system of Staatsexamen, which they want to keep perpetually unchanged from how it functioned in 19th century Prussia.
Despite this criticism, I chose this field deliberately and I’m still glad about it. I have just always been inherently skeptical towards archaically preordained systems.