Women Knowledge and Legal Reality: Advancing the Frontier of Legal Education

The inadequacy of the law on the rights of women led to the feminist movement whereby feminist theories were developed but are not part of legal education. Since legal education has long suffered the tension between the claims of what is proper for training for a profession, and the education or training of scholars in the academy, the students ought to learn the technical aspects of law, and the scope of legal education should focus primarily on teaching legal doctrine. The objective of this paper is to advocate that these feminist legal theories be inculcated to advance the frontier of legal education in our institutions so that the Law students will be able to make informed decisions on the nature of Law. The methodology used is the secondary source of data collection. The findings are that feminist ideas are not adequately addressed in legal education since it is not yet the practice to convey these ideas to law students in a systematic manner and law courses include an eclectic choice of feminist literature with no, or very little effort at explaining the significance of feminist critiques in the context of other (mainstream) legal literature. Therefore the study concludes that if these theories form part of law student's curriculum, the students will thereby learn how to take responsibility for their own views of the nature of law and systematic engagement with feminist critiques in legal education can enable law students to question the very foundations of mainstream knowledge.