Legal Education in the United States


Book Description

Harno, Albert J. Legal Education in the U.S.: A Report Prepared for the Survey of the Legal Profession. San Francisco: Bancroft-Whitney Company, 1953. v, 211 pp. Reprint available August 2004 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN 1-58477-441-X. Cloth. $70. * This concise yet detailed survey offers an excellent introduction to the history of American legal education from the colonial era to the 1950s. Its evolutionary perspective derives from one telling insight: "A social consciousness of the significance of law to a people is an attribute of a ripening civilization" (18). In succeeding chapters, Harno examines "Our English Heritage," "The Formative Period of American Legal Education," "Early American Law Schools and the Laissez Faire Period," "The Case Method," "Impact of Professional Organizations, Criticisms of Modern Legal Education," and "Legal Education-A Present Appraisement."




American Legal Education Abroad


Book Description

A critical history of the Americanization of legal education in fourteen countries The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the export of American power—both hard and soft—throughout the world. What role did US cultural and economic imperialism play in legal education? American Legal Education Abroad offers an unprecedented and surprising picture of the history of legal education in fourteen countries beyond the United States. Each study in this book represents a critical history of the Americanization of legal education, reexamining prevailing narratives of exportation, transplantation, and imperialism. Collectively, these studies challenge the conventional wisdom that American ideas and practices have dominated globally. Editors Susan Bartie and David Sandomierski and their contributors suggest that to understand legal education and to respond thoughtfully to the mounting present-day challenges, it is essential to look beyond a particular region and consider not only the ideas behind legal education but also the broader historical, political, and cultural factors that have shaped them. American Legal Education Abroad begins with an important foundational history by leading Harvard Law School historian Bruce Kimball, who explains the factors that created a transportable American legal model, and the book concludes with reflections from two prominent American law professors, Susan Carle and Bob Gordon, whose observations on recent disruptions within US law schools suggest that their influence within the global order of legal education may soon fall into further decline. This book should be considered an invaluable resource for anyone in the field of law.




Doctoral Degree Programs in Law


Book Description

This book offers a critical and insightful study of various doctoral programs in law, focusing on the English-speaking world. That the structures of doctoral degree programs in law differ between the United States and much of the Commonwealth are an issue that requires no debate. What is missing in the discourse, however, is a narrative on how these programs are structured and how they compare. This book attempts to fill that gap. A key objective of the study is to provide an international and comparative analysis of the efficacy of the American- and British-styled models of law doctorates. In so doing, it provides a conceptual and theoretical framework for the development of effective doctoral programs in law, contending that the defining characteristic of a doctorate is that it recognizes an independent contribution to the subject rather than the completion of taught coursework, however, advanced. The book goes on to examine the concept of a higher doctorate in law as a possible means of strengthening the concept of a law doctorate in legal academia. This book was written against the backdrop of the recently adopted Global Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications concerning higher education. It was adopted by the UNESCO General Conference in Paris on November 25, 2019, making it the first United Nations treaty on higher education with a global scope. The target audience of the book includes scholars in higher education; scholars in legal education; law school deans and administrators; law professors and students; Ministries of Higher Education in countries around the globe; accrediting agencies for doctoral studies; bar admission and legal education societies; and UNESCO and other international organizations.




The Export of Legal Education


Book Description

This collection is the multifaceted result of an effort to learn from those who have been educated in an American law school and who then returned to their home countries to apply the lessons of that experience in nations experiencing social, economic, governmental, and legal transition. Written by an international group of scholars and practitioners, this work provides a unique insight into the ways in which legal education impacts the legal system in the recipient’s home country, addressing such topics as efforts to influence the current style of legal education in a country and the resistance faced from entrenched senior faculty and the use of U.S. legal education methods in government and private legal practice. This book will be of significant interest not only to legal educators in the United States and internationally, and to administrators of legal education policy and reform, but also to scholars seeking a more in-depth understanding of the connections between legal education and socio-political change.










American Comparative Law


Book Description

"Historical Comparative Law and Comparative Legal History Legal history and comparative law overlap in important respects. This is more apparent with the use of some methods for comparison, such as legal transplant, natural law, or nation building. M.N.S. Sellers nicely portrayed the relationship. The past is a foreign country, its people strangers and its laws obscure.... No one can really understand her or his own legal system without leaving it first, and looking back from the outside. The comparative study of law makes one's own legal system more comprehensible, by revealing its idiosyncrasies. Legal history is comparative law without travel. Legal historians, perhaps especially in the United States, have been skeptical about the possibility of a fruitful comparative legal history, preferring in general to investigate the distinctiveness of their national experience. Comparatists, however, content with revealing or promoting similarities or differences between legal systems, by their nature strive toward comparison. Some American historians, especially since World War II, see the value in this"--




Courts and Comparative Law


Book Description

While the role of comparative law in the courts was previously only an exception, foreign sources are now increasingly becoming a source of law in regular use in supreme and constitutional courts. There is considerable variation between the practices of courts and the role of comparative law, and methods remain controversial. In the US, the issue has been one of intense public debate and it is still one of the major dividing issues in the discussion about the role of the courts. Contributing to the existing discussion of the use of comparative law in the courts, this book provides an inclusive, coherent, and practical analysis of the relevant law and jurisprudence in comparative law in the courts. It examines the consequences for court procedures and the form of judgments, as well as how foreign sources are drawn upon in private international law, European law, administrative law, and constitutional law as well as before general courts. The book also includes case studies of comparative law used in particular spheres of the law, such as tort law and consumer law. Written by practising judges and lawyers as well as leading academics, this book serves as a central reference point concerning the role of comparative law before the courts.




The Cambridge Handbook of Comparative Law


Book Description

Comparative law is a common subject-matter of research and teaching in many universities around the world, and the twenty-first century has aptly been termed 'the era of comparative law'. This Cambridge Handbook of Comparative Law presents a truly global perspective of comparative law today. The contributors are drawn from all parts of the world to provide different perspectives on how we understand the 'law' and how it operates in practice. In substance, the Handbook contains 36 chapters covering a broad range of topics, divided under the following headings: 'Methods of Comparative Law' (Part I), 'Legal Families and Geographical Comparisons' (Part II), 'Central Themes in Comparative Law' (Part III); and 'Comparative Law beyond the State' (Part IV).