Law and Learning in an Era of Globalization

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which globalization, as a dominant influence on political economy, makes its presence felt on legal education and research. In particular, it questions whether law schools have maintained agency in the choice to embrace globalization in their curricula, scholarship and general orientation or whether law schools have been forced to bend to the realities of the global economy. While neo-liberal “globalization of the mind” has shifted assumptions about the project of law and entrenched a “new normal” in legal education and scholarship, the McGill curriculum – based on so-called transsystemic legal education – offers the promise of professional and intellectual formation based on law’s radical indeterminacy in an era of globalization, neo-liberalism and law without the state.