Legal education is changing. What is changing is our understanding of “education”, of how we learn and how we should teach. Also changing is our understanding of how to define what is “legal” about “legal education”. Most will nowadays agree that legal education should be more than a vocational training for the practice of the profession in a particular jurisdiction. In analyzing the development of legal education in recent years, we can distinguish two trajectories. Firstly, there is the ongoing attempt of specifically the North American legal academy to make legal studies a transdisciplinary endeavour, a development closely connected to the major “paradigm shifts” in legal theory in the 20th century. Secondly, it seems that jurisdictional boundaries have lost significance in an internationalized, globalized and post-regulatory environment. This calls into question the very notion of “law” itself, at least as traditionally understood as a system of posited norms within a given jurisdiction. How should both developments be reconciled?

Modern contract law theorists frequently invoke Kantian ideas to conceptualize contract as a form of immediate transfer. The Kantian theory of contract itself is eclectic: Kant makes use of the main conceptual building blocks of Natural Law (in particular Grotian) contract doctrine – promise and transfer. Yet Kant re-arranges and adapts them to his own epistemology and conceptual system. I submit that because of this connection, additional light can be shed on Kant’s theory of contract by placing it in the context of contemporary Natural Law discourse. One of the most outspoken critics of contract theory in the Grotian tradition was then famous (and now apocryphal) legal philosopher Theodor Schmalz. Schmalz faulted Natural Law thought for conceptualizing contract as transfer by fallaciously – “subreptively”– explaining the normative event of creating an obligation through the model of the empirical transfer of physical objects. Kant’s theory reads like a response to this critique: Kant avoids modelling contract on the transfer of property. Rather, he explains any transfer as contractual, brought about by a unified will.