The voice of the stranger: foreign LL.M. students’ experiences of culture, law and pedagogy in US law schools

Abstract

This chapter illuminates the experiences of international attorneys who are traveling to the US to seek an LL.M. degree, the equivalent of a master’s degree in law. Following theorists Simmel (1908) and Schuetz (1944), I argue that international LL.M. students’ positions as “strangers” make them acute observers of US law, the students and faculty they encounter, the legal education they have chosen to pursue, and the ways in which US law constructs, and is constructed by, the wider social order. My work differs from Simmel and Schuetz, however, in that I give concrete voice to the strangers I am studying. In contrast to most studies of legal education, these students are already lawyers, almost all of them were trained first in a civil rather than a common law tradition, and most of them were learning US law in a second language. Their success, therefore, requires that they master different rules for speaking and maintaining silence, other methods of legal reasoning and other rules of procedures. As strangers, they must “undo” what they previously understood to be thinking like a lawyer so that they can think like a US lawyer. I also use the case of transnational lawyers to “de-familiarize” the law school experience, using a mode of inquiry that Marcus and Fischer (1999) identified as “anthropology as cultural critique.” My subjects of inquiry are thus both “them” – foreign lawyers in US law schools – and “us,” often punctuated in their eyes as “US.”