The journal “Ruch Prawniczy, Ekonomiczny i Socjologiczny” has published an article by Dr Dawid Kostecki of Kozminski University entitled “Legal Culture in the Age of Liquid Modernity. On the Need to Reaffirm the Ethos of the Legal Profession.” It is a text that goes to the heart of the contemporary debate about law: not so much how to apply legal provisions, but how to educate lawyers and how to understand their role when law changes faster than textbooks, under the influence of globalisation, technology, including AI, and dynamic political, social and economic transformations.
Liquid modernity as a test for legal education
The starting point is Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of “liquid modernity,” used as a framework for discussing legal education in times marked by uncertainty, transience and relativism.
In such a world, a lawyer no longer operates in a stable ecosystem where it is enough to know the code and consistently apply established patterns. Change is permanent, and the legal services market is increasingly demanding. It expects not only formal correctness, but also contextual understanding, communication skills and responsibility for the social consequences of legal action.
At this point, the author advances a clear thesis: the debate over whether legal studies should be “practical” or “theoretical” is largely illusory. The critique of the positivist model of education is not an academic exercise. It is an attempt to answer a more fundamental question: does legal education truly prepare students for a world in which law is ever more closely intertwined with technology, the economy, culture and politics?
The professional ethos as a constant in a changing world
One of the strongest messages of the article is the conviction that, despite the growing egalitarianism and inclusiveness of legal studies, their fundamental purpose has not changed. It remains the co-formation of civic awareness in the interest of the common good.
This represents an important shift in emphasis. The author does not argue that adding a new course will solve the problem. Rather, he suggests that without ethos, understood as professional and social responsibility, law risks becoming merely a set of techniques, a form of social engineering. In such a scenario, the lawyer becomes a service provider who efficiently applies procedures without understanding their deeper meaning.
Humanities, soft skills and critical thinking as a market advantage
In a world of rapidly changing regulations, knowledge of normative acts alone is no longer sufficient. The author states this explicitly: equally important are soft skills and the capacity for critical thinking. Moreover, today’s lawyer needs competences that go beyond classical legal dogmatics, including knowledge of sociology, politics, culture, economics and management.
From this perspective, the humanities are not a decorative element of the curriculum but a tool for understanding the world in which law operates. This, in turn, directly affects the quality of legal practice.
The article also points to a direction of change. Restoring the proper place of humanistic reflection should not take the form of a nostalgic return to old methods. Instead, it should be achieved through modern forms of teaching, such as case studies, moot court simulations and Oxford-style debates, which can effectively shape new generations of lawyers capable of meeting the expectations of the legal services market.
The text concludes with an important organisational suggestion: the model of legal education requires changes of an ethos-oriented and structural nature. Inspiration may be drawn from the Finnish model of legal education, which closely integrates general education and higher education into one coherent ecosystem.
Dr Dawid Kostecki’s article is therefore more than a diagnosis. It is an invitation to reflect on how to build a profession resilient to “liquidity”: technologically competent, practically efficient, yet firmly rooted in ethos and in a broad understanding of legal culture.
This text is a machine translation and may require linguistic editing.
