In today’s world of many legal cultures and traditions, development of optimal curriculum and legal methodologies by law schools with varying financial resources and diverse missions and cultures generates a wide range of combinations of curriculum and legal methodology choices. This panel will identify and address differences and similarities in defining and developing these choices.
As legal educators we balance advantages and disadvantages of various curricula and legal education methodologies including use of case law, case problem, lecture, simulation, externships, clinical and other methodologies to meet unique economic, political, and societal needs of differing legal systems, cultures, and law schools around the world. To facilitate general discussion of this process by law schools in diverse legal systems and cultures, this symposium uses recent experiences of the University of Cape Town Law School in South Africa (forging a curriculum facilitating implementation of a post apartheid constitutional system); the University of Maastricht Law School in The Netherlands (setting up a European Law School); the new curriculum and legal methodology at the San Paolo University School of Law; the experience of the Peking University School of Transnational Law; and the decision of the Harvard Law School to supplement its use in the first-year curriculum of case law methodology with case problem methodology and also to add courses in international and comparative law and legislation and regulation.