Academic

This conference, a major event in the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the GSU College of Law, will take as its point of departure a highly critical report on American legal education recently issued by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: Educating Lawyers. The report calls for fundamental changes in both the structure and content of legal education in the United States to integrate realistic and real-life lawyering experiences throughout the curriculum, and challenges American law schools to produce lawyers who are not only smart problem-solvers but also responsible professionals committed to service of both clients and the larger society. The conference will bring together leading legal educators from both the United States and other countries with leaders from the legal profession.

The Carnegie Foundation?s Report, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law reminds us that the challenge for legal education requires a linking of the ?interests of legal educators with the needs of legal practitioners and with the public the profession is pledged to serve?in other words, fostering what can be called civic professionalism.? Educating Lawyers would reverse the drift of American legal education recast legal education towards a purely academic orientation, recasting legal education as fundamentally professional rather than academic, outward and not inward looking. Educating Lawyers? focus is almost completely devoted to domestic law. Yet, civic professionalism does not end at the borders of the United States, and American lawyers long ago stopped thinking of national borders as the borders of their professional lives. The law schools have been responding. Many law schools are now wrestling with issues relating to the incorporation of a transnational legal component?including elements of international, comparative, foreign and transnational law?within their teaching and scholarship missions. These changes mirror discussions within the legal academy over a move from a ?national law practice? to a multi-jurisdictional practice model of legal education. Yet these two great reform efforts have developed along parallel tracks. This paper looks at the development of these parallel discussions of reform of legal education. The framework is described in Part I. The paper then turns to a critical review of Educating Lawyers, focusing on its basic assumptions that serve as the foundation for the suggestions for the changes proposed. Part III examines the parallel development of the several strands of proposals for the incorporation of non-domestic legal education in American law schools, suggesting first an analytical framework for evaluating these proposals and then evaluating the several forms of incorporation that dominate incorporation of the transborder element in law school curricular, research and service activities. These are divided into five categories?three are elaborations of traditional models and two others, an immersion model and separation model, represent emerging framework structures. Part IV considers these models of integration in light of the foundational model of apprenticeship proposed in Educating Lawyers. It suggests that transborder legal education can be integrated in legal education within the framework of Educating Lawyers but that not all emerging models of such integration are compatible with that framework.

My critical summary of the excellent presentations at the conference will be posted in the next couple of days. Please come back and read these soon. Comments welcome!