Can Law be Learned without Practising Law? Experiential Learning and the Practice-Classroom Gap in Legal Education
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Legal education can produce students who read cases well, identify doctrine accurately, and write persuasive answers while still having little experience deciding what should be done when a legal problem is incomplete. This article examines that practice-classroom gap through a qualitative integrative review of peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2020 and 2026. The literature does not support a simple demand for more clinics or placements. Practical activity becomes educationally significant when students must make decisions about problems that have not been fully framed and then defend or revise those decisions under feedback. The synthesis develops the knowing-doing divide as a problem of recontextualising legal knowledge and proposes practice proximity to distinguish activities that merely resemble professional work from those that expose students to its intellectual demands. Recent criticism of authentic assessment strengthens this distinction because workplace resemblance can narrow university legal education when professional practice becomes the sole measure of reality. The article argues for a curriculum in which doctrinal learning and progressively demanding experience remain connected without becoming interchangeable, allowing students to move repeatedly between knowing law and deciding what to do with it.
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