Global Law Schools on U.S. Models: Emerging Models of Consensus-Based Internationalization or Markets-Based Americanization Models of Global Legal Education

Abstract

This article examines two substantially irreconcilable approaches to internationalization that are emerging in the United States. The first focuses on globalizing the law school curriculum through internationalization. This approach is congruent with emerging trends in legal education internationalization in Europe. The second approaches internationalization as a market driven competition for influence among dominant domestic legal orders, that is, as nationalist globalization. Internationalization is understood as the extension of the influence of national law outside the national territory and is nicely illustrated by recent efforts to globalize the law school curriculum by internationalizing the conventional U.S. law school curriculum. The principle thesis is this: The global legal education community, led by the Europeans, has been constructing a vision of globalization of legal education that has as its basis the idea of harmonization and convergence of different systems and the development of a new institutional model grounded in harmonized global trends in law. The United States appears to be taking two approaches to this development. After an Introduction, Part II examines the internationalization efforts of U.S. law schools following one of five models: (1) integration; (2) segregation; (3) aggregation; (4) immersion; and (5) multi-disciplinary department models. This project seeks a newer framework for the construction of shared legal structures grounded in joint effort that is not dominated by the approaches off any one state. Part III then examines the ways in which American institutions are also working against this general trend by positing a form of nationalist globalization that has as its foundation the idea that national legal education can go global without globalizing the law taught. Nationalist globalization takes three forms: a focus on the training of lawyers for domestic service whose pedagogical methodologies can be exported, the extraterritorial extension of the U.S. law school system, and the management of post graduate degrees in law for foreign law graduates. In place of harmonization and globalization of law, the American nationalist globalization model grounded in extraterritorial competition for socialization in the laws of the domestic legal order of dominant states. The article ends with an analysis of the consequences of these competing forms of global engagement in legal education. While much of the attention on changes to the American law school environment has focused on internationalization within consensus-based and supplementary programs founded on the internationalization ideal, American law schools have also been developing market-based strategies that are, at their core, fundamentally inconsistent with the internationalization framework.