Like most intellectual disciplines the law has its technical concepts, frequently expressed in technical terms.All lawyers must become acquainted too with the processes of making law, settling disputes, and regulating the legal profession. They must study the structure of government and the organization of courts of law, including the system of appeals and other adjudicating bodies.

Another aim of legal education is the teaching of law in its social, economic, political, and scientific contexts. While law schools have never ignored the social context of their subject, Anglo-American legal education has always been less interdisciplinary than that of continental Europe. With the development of a more or less scientific approach to social studies in the 20th century, however, this is changing. Some law schools appoint economists, psychologists, or sociologists to their staffs, while others require or permit their students to take courses outside the law school as part of their work toward a degree. This awareness of the other social studies is thought to be more advanced in the United States than in Great Britain. Continental legal education (in both eastern and western Europe) tends to be highly interdisciplinary, with non legal subjects compulsory for students taking their first degree in law.

Traditionally, legal education included the teaching of legal history, which was once regarded as an essential part of any educated lawyer’s equipment. While legal history has lost prestige in the sense that separate courses in the subject are offered in few law schools and, when optional, are not very popular among students, much legal history is, nonetheless, taught in the context of other courses. Since the corpus of the law is a constantly evolving collection of rules and principles, many teachers consider it necessary to trace the development of the branch of law they are discussing. In countries where most parts of the law are codified (as for example, in continental Europe, Central and South America, the countries in the Mediterranean basin and in Africa that were formerly under French influence, Thailand, and Japan), it is not generally thought necessary to go back beyond the codes. On the other hand, in countries that have a common-law system (England, most members of the British Commonwealth, and most parts of the United States), in which few branches of law are codified, knowledge of the law has traditionally depended to a great extent on the study of court decisions and statutes out of which common law evolved. This made the study of legal history of more immediate significance in such countries. However, as the former case-law areas have increasingly come under statutory and administrative regulation, the practical importance of legal history has receded.

The graduating law student is not expected to have studied the whole body of substantive law. He is, however, expected to be familiar with the general principles of the main branches of law. To this end certain subjects are regarded as basic: constitutional law, governing the major organs of state; the law of contract, governing obligations entered into by agreement; the law of tort, governing compensation for personal injury and damage to property, income, or reputation; the law of real (or immovable) property, governing transactions with land; and criminal (or penal) law, governing punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation, and prevention of offences against the public order. The chief materials are the same everywhere, codes (where these exist), reports of court decisions, legislation, government and other public reports, institutional books (in civil-law countries), textbooks, and articles in learned periodicals. The aim is not much that the student should remember “the law” as that he should understand basis concepts and methods and become sufficiently familiar with a law library to carry out the necessary research on any legal problem that may come his way.