The Globalization of Legal Education: A Critical Perspective

This book, with contributors from nine countries, seeks to critically understand the processes of legal education reform and resistance and to point to what these processes mean for law and lawyers inside and outside of the United States. The book seeks to understand the forces driving these processes and to evaluate their implications. Its substantive chapters provide critical insights into how these transnational processes operate in different jurisdictions around the world in light of globalization and local competition. Taken together, the chapters show how institutions and practices of legal education have historically moved across jurisdictions and shaped legal education practices transnationally, as well as the challenges and limits these processes have faced. The chapters also show how that diffusion relates to empires and imperial competition, and in particular today to the rise in power of the United States after the Cold War-and the related diffusion of neoliberal economic policies that have also fueled the spread of corporate law firms modeled on the United States. The book shows how local processes play and evolve in relation to global balances of power.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence.

Bryant Garth is a graduate of Yale (1972), Stanford Law School (1975), and the European University Institute in Florence (1979). He began his career working with Mauro Cappelletti on the Florence Access to Justice Project, which resulted in five published volumes (1977-1979). He began teaching at Indiana University in 1979, becoming Dean in 1986, then moved to the American Bar Foundation as Director in 1990, staying until 2005. He then became Dean at Southwestern School of Law for seven years, before moving to the University of California Irvine School of Law. Two of his seven major books (three edited) on law and globalization, co-authored with Yves Dezalay, have been given the Herbert Jacob award as best books of that year by the Law and Society Association.

Gregory Shaffer received his JD from Stanford Law School (1988) and his BA from Dartmouth College (1980) and practiced law with Coudert Brothers and Bredin Prat in Paris. He started at the University of Wisconsin, became Wing Tat Lee Chair at Loyola University Law School, Chicago, then Melvin C. Steen Professor at Minnesota Law School before becoming Chancellor's Professor of Law at UC, Irvine School of Law. He is President-Elect of the American Society of International Law and a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law and the Journal of International Economic Law, among others.