Building Bridges

The European Academy of Legal Theory (EALT) was founded in 1989 by the Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, the Katholieke Universiteit Brussel and the European Association for the Teaching of Legal Theory. From this year, the Academy has held intensive seminars on legal theory, under the auspices of the Erasmus programme. From 1992 the Academy launched a third cycle, a complete Master's programme on legal theory. The success of such initiatives was immediate: every year around thirty students coming from different European countries were selected for the intensive seminars and for the master's degree on legal theory.
This success points to the educational need to redefine the methodological and ethical foundations of legal regulation: the progressive construction of Europe, the rapid transformations of methods and instruments of thought, and the unprecedented ethical and political challenges being thrust upon us at the moment.

In 2008/09 the cooperation between the European Association for the Teaching of Legal Theory and the aforementioned two Universities in Brussels has ended and the master programme has expired (for information on the EALT Master Course in Legal Theory 1992-2009 see the archive section of this webpage).

The European Association has therefore decided to re-establish the EALT and its Master Course in Legal Theory as an international joint master programme offered by:

• the University of Vienna
• the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)
• the Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main
• the Jagiellonian University Cracow.

The new EALT curriculum for joint and/or double master degrees in legal theory is currently under construction and the re-launch of the EALT Master Course in Legal Theory is planned for the academic year 2011/12 (application will open at the beginning of 2011).

The content of the new Master's degree in legal theory (the details of which will be added in the course of 2010/11) seeks to offer a critical and interdisciplinary synthesis of the main elements and paradigms which clash in the field of legal theory. Legal evolutions are thus placed in the light of European development and of contemporary scientific debates. The programme is meant for persons with a law degree (for exceptions see accession criteria) who wish to broaden their horizons, either at the beginning of a doctoral thesis, of an academic career in legal science, or before starting a career as a practising lawyer. One of the main goals of the master's programme is to acquaint young lawyers with the social, ethical and political background of law and with its basic principles and structures. The master's course offers a solid theoretical and methodological framework which will enable students to find their way through the plurality of legal orders in an integrating Europe.

The European Academy of Legal Theory and its new master course will build bridges between fields which are too often segregated by responding to a three-fold challenge:

It is firstly necessary to build bridges between countries, university customs, national cultures and legal traditions. This dialogue between cultures implies that, thanks to a sufficient knowledge of foreign languages, access to varying patterns of thought is possible. This point will be strengthened and fostered by the new composition of partner universities spread all over Europe, allowing the Academy to offer a truly multicultural and multilingual education. In guiding the laborious but resolute process of construction of Europe, legal theory will assume an important role. Is it not up to legal theory to reveal common principles and traditions beyond local particularisms? Is it not its place to look beyond the status quo and seek out new solutions?

Secondly, a bridge should be built between the study of positive law and the study of legal theory. Too often these fields are studied separately as if opposed to each other. But practice without theory is blind while theory without practice is useless. Our Master's programme is meant to be both theoretical and critical, but with an aim of placing theory and critique at the very heart of positive law and legal practice. The hosting partner universities of the new master programme will therefore enter various co-operations with professional associations and offer these networks to participants during and after taking part in the programme.
Finally, we aim to build a bridge between the various branches of the theory of law, which are often artificially compartmentalised. Our programme is interdisciplinary -not just a juxtaposition of several disciplines, but a dialogue in which each type of knowledge is inspired and nourished by other approaches. Our programme does not claim to cover fully this interdisciplinary network between all disciplines and approaches in the field of legal theory. But thanks to the numerous specialists available at the five curriculum offering EALT partner universities and invited guest lecturers from all over Europe and beyond, and thanks to the network of agreements entered into with other European universities and research centres (ready to host students of the EALT master course as visiting researchers), the students of the European Academy of Legal Theory will be able to continue to pursue their research after their stay in Vienna, Brussels, Frankfurt, or Cracow

Answering these questions, building these bridges, avoiding the separation of knowledge into different compartments, and going beyond national borders, represents nothing but the old ideal of Universitas. With this programme we want to contribute to the development of a long-term ideal: the establishment of an authentically European law faculty.