Why attend? For several decades, U.S. law schools have experimented with globalizing their curriculum to varying degrees. Some law schools have simply added a few elective or required courses to their menu of offerings while others have innovated to attempt to integrate the global and transnational across the curriculum or have emphasized experiential cross-cultural learning through such means as study abroad opportunities or the use of technology across boundaries. These choices have rightly raised questions about relevance to our students and to the practice of law of such undertakings as well as issues of resource allocation when law schools should worry about the rising cost of legal education and student debt. Law schools that have resolved these initial inquiries are still asking whether the methods employed at their own legal institutions are sufficient or effective to prepare students for an increasingly globalized and rapidly changing legal profession.
This workshop engages many of these looming questions about the why and the how to globalize the curriculum. The workshop is organized into three plenary sessions, two in the morning and one to close the program, with two sections of three concurrent each nestled in between. In the first plenary, the planning committee invited prominent lawyers to discuss with us not only the nature of their legal practice but to reflect on how their legal education failed or succeeded in preparing them for the global aspects of their practice. The planning committee was intentional and selected not only the lawyer in big firm practice (to be announced) but also the local government and small firm lawyer to illustrate the variations of the transnational in U.S. legal practice. As well, the planning committee included the perspective of the international law student educated in a U.S. law school who returned home to practice to bring a perspective from a growing body of consumer of U.S. law schools today.
The second plenary explores the larger questions of whether U.S. law schools are at a paradigm shift to embrace a more comprehensive and meaningful global education; that is, one that does not draw artificial lines between the domestic and the transnational or arbitrary distinctions among international and domestic students. As well, are law schools preparing lawyers to represent clients, whether corporations, nation-states, or individuals, ethically and competently to account for cultural and linguistic differences as well as political and economic imbalances?
These questions are not ones solely relevant to U.S. legal education. Law schools in other countries must also address the challenges associated with globalization. In the final panel, distinguished educators from four leading overseas law schools will offer