Thailand Law Journal 2010 Spring Issue 1 Volume 13

Even with the standardisation of legal education in common law jurisdictions, the guild-like nature of the profession encouraged a focus not merely on national but on sub-national jurisdictions. In the United States, for example, admission to practice in one state did not require either familiarity with or the ability to practice in anther.¹⁵ As interstate commerce and thus cross-jurisdictional legal practice increased, so did the need for lawyers to be familiar with other jurisdictions and, with the movement of professionals, to have a means of transferring accreditation.¹⁶

Similar things happened in the first phase of transformation  identified here as internationalisation. As a modest advance on a purely local conception of the law. this international paradigm saw the world as an archipelago of jurisdictions, with a small number of lawyers involved in mediating disputes between jurisdictions or determining which jurisdiction applied. This is the world of traditional interna­tional law, with a majority of practice taking place within a given jurisdiction and educational institutions thus focusing on training students for that purpose.¹⁷

Specialised areas of practice and research developed within this paradigm. One was conflict of laws (or private international law) as the sub-discipline that helped to identify which jurisdiction applied to a specific problem. A second was public international law, which-despite a voluminous secondary literature-was applied in formal judicial processes in the far fewer actual cases of interactions between jurisdictions as states.¹⁸ Though comparative law also went through a phase of development around this time, it was seen as largely confined to academic study rather than being integral to the practice of law.¹⁹

Students within this period rarely moved. The vast majority studied in the juris­diction in which they lived and within which they would practice, with the exception of those living under colonial rule who might be sent to the metropole for instruction and recruitment into the ruling class.²⁰

III. TRANSNATIONALISATION

The term "transnational law" is commonly attributed to Philip C. Jessup's Storrs Lectures at Yale in the 1950s, where he used the term to embrace "all law which reg­ulates actions or events that transcend national frontiers."²¹ For present purposes, it denotes the shift in perspectives that came slightly later, in the 1970s and 1980s, where the world came to be seen not as an archipelago but as a patchwork of juris­dictions. The increasing mobility of capital and people required, and made possible. greater familiarity across jurisdictions. Within law schools, this took the form of collaborations and exchange programmes.²²

Practice continued to be jurisdiction-based, but this period saw the rise of firms with presences in many cities-acknowledging the need to be able to operate seam­lessly when moving from one jurisdiction to another.²³ Law schools began to offer summer programmes abroad: in the United States in 1975, five American Bar Asso­ciation (ABA)-approved law schools offered such programmes; a generation later 120 law schools did.²⁴ Some were regarded as little more than boondoggles. In the 1976-77 academic year, for example, the ABA's Accreditation Committee received notice of a programme to be offered onboard a cruise ship: courses were to be taught by faculty from an unaccredited law school, excessive credit was to be awarded for the period of study, and there appeared to be no library or study facilities available to the "students."²⁵ But, for the most part, these programmes demonstrated a desire on the part of students to get some measure of experience outside their home jurisdiction.

Of more lasting significance was the increase in exchange programmes and the rise in the number of foreign students admitted into law degree programmes. The National University of Singapore, for example, today has one of the most extensive exchange arrangements in the world. More than a third of its undergraduate law students spend a semester or full year on exchange to one of more than fifty universities in sixteen countries, with a corresponding number of students coming from abroad to study in Singapore.²⁶

The increasing diversity of the student population has had an important effect on the classroom, though a further shift is in process now as the movement across juris­dictions of transnationalisation has given way to the emergence of a single globalised market.

IV. GLOBALISATION

The third phase of evolution of legal education is where we are now: globalisation.²⁷ This can be understood as the integration of countries and peoples brought about by deep reductions in the costs of transport and communication, and the dismantling of barriers to the flow of goods, services, capital. knowledge, and people.²⁸

The world has moved from archipelago to patchwork to web--both in the sense of the rise of the Internet as well as in the sense that commercial and other activities do not simply overlap at the edges but may be structurally and inextricably linked. Leading law firms increasingly present themselves as "global", a status measured for the first time in 1998 when the American Lawyer first published its "Global Fifty" list of firms ranked by size and revenue.²⁹ This has been augmented by the increasing importance of non-traditional regulatory regimes that transcend traditional jurisdictional analysis. Whether it is compliance with ISO standards, controlling the behaviour of multinational corporations, or-to pick the most obvious example ­regulation of the Internet itself, contemporary normative questions are frequently global rather than local.³⁰

To operate effectively in such a world, individual lawyers need to be comfortable in multiple jurisdictions, often simultaneously.³¹ In the words of one dean, we need to educate lawyers to be "residents" rather than "tourists" in new jurisdictions.³² At the same time, the students entering law school are different. In the course of the twentieth century, we moved from a tradition of a person having one job as a career to expecting to move jobs once or twice.³³ We now deal with students who expect to move countries a few times, seeing themselves as part of a global elite in a worldwide market for talent.

Within legal education, the first mark of globalisation as distinct from transnation­alisation was the move from exchange programmes to double-degree programmes across national jurisdictions. Examples from the United States include Cornell Uni­versity Law School, which offers double-degrees in partnership with universities in France and Germany;³⁴ Columbia Law School, which also has partners in France and Germany as well as England;³⁵ New York University School of Law (NYU), which partners with Osgoode Hall Law School in Canada and the National University of Singapore;³⁶ and American University Washington College of Law, which includes partner universities in Canada, Spain, France. England, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Korea, South Africa, and Uganda.³⁷

15. Colin Croft, "Reconceptualizing American Legal Professionalism: A Proposal for Deliberative Moral Community" (1992) 67 N.Y U.L. Rev. 1256 at 1296.

16. Cf. George A. Reimer, "A State of Flux: Trends in the Regulation of the Multijurisdictional Practice of Law" (2004) 64 Oregon State Bar Bulletin 19.

17. Again, a contrast may be made with civil law education. which had a far richer tradition of exchanging faculty and ideas based on a shared heritage.

18. Cf. Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. _,)01).

19. Singapore, unusually, has included the study of comparative law as a compulsory subject at both its law schools. Harvard has added this more recently. Tan Cheng Han, supra note 9 at 204.

20. Until the early 1960s, for example, most of Africa's lawyers were trained in Britain. Many of the national programmes that developed subsequently emphasised preparation for practice at the expense of critical analytical skills. Though such a criticism might also be made of American and European legal training, graduates typically begin work with more experienced colleagues. This was not always possible when starting up a domestic legal profession in the period of decolonisation. Muna Ndulo, "Legal Education in Africa in the Era of Globalization and Structural Adjustment" (2002) 20 Penn St. Int'l L. Rev. 487.

21. Philip C. Jessup, Transnational Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956).

22. From 2004, the University of Michigan began requiring students to complete a course in "rransnational Law" prior to graduating. See Mathias Reimann, "Taking Globalization Seriously: Michigan Breaks New Ground by Requiring 4.e Study of Transnational Law" (2003) 82-JUL Mich. BJ. 52.

23. Skadden, Alps opened its first office outside of New York in 1973; Allen & Overy opened its first office outside of London in 1978. Today Clifford Chance has 28 offices in 21 countries. About Clifford Chance (2008), online: <httpJ/www.cliffordchance.comlabout_us/about_the_firm/?LangID=UK&>.

24. James P. White, "A Look at Legal Education: The Globalization of American Legal Education" (2007) 82 Ind. L.J. 1285 at 1287.

25. Ibid. Thirty years later, Tulane University also proposed to house students on a cruise ship, though this was part of the response to devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans the previous year. Piper Fogg, "At Tulane, Living on a Cruise Ship Is No Luxury Vacation" (2006) 52(20) Chron. Higher Educ. A14.

26. For a discussion of how the National University of Singapore's approach to education has evolved, see Alexander Loke, "Forging a New Equilibrium in Singapore Legal Education" (2006) 24 Wis. Int'l L.J. 261; Tan Cheng Han, supra note 9.

27. See generally John E. Sexton, "'Out of the Box': Thinking About the Training of Lawyers in the Next Millennium" (2001) 33 U. Tol. L. Rev. 189.

28. See Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002) at 9.

29. John E. Morris, " [lte Global 50" American Lawyer (November 1998) 45.

30. See generally Benedict Kingsbury, Nico Krisch & Richard B. Stewart, `"Ihe Emergence of Global Administrative Law" (2005) 68 Law & Contemp. Probs. 15; Simon Chesterman, "Globalization Rules: Accountability, Power, and the Prospects for Global Administrative Law" (2008) 14 Global Governance 39.

31. Tan Cheng Han, "Law School Has to Keep Up with the Times". Straits Times (26 April 2007).

32. Mary C. Daly, 'Tourist or Resident?: Educating Students For Transnational Legal Practice (2005) 23 Penn St. Int'l L. Rev. 785.

33. One study estimated that lawyers beginning in small U.S. firms move once every eight years; another found that within six years of graduating from law school, almost half of lawyers in private practice and almost two-thirds of those in government were no longer working with their first employer. Ronit D inovitzer & Bryant G. Garth. "Lawyer Satisfaction in the Process of Structuring Legal Careers" (2007) 41 Law & Soc'y Rev. 1.

34. Cornell University Law School, Dual Degrees, online: <http://www.lawschool.comell.edu/admissions/ degrees/ duaLdegree.cfm>.

35. Columbia Law, Foreign Double Degree Programs. online: <http://www.law.columbia.edu/center_ program/ intl_progs/Double_degrees>.

36. New York University School of law, online: <http://www.law.nyu.edtt>. (This refers to the LL.B.-J.D. and LL.B.- LL.M. double-degree programmes. The dual degree programme taught together with NUS will be discussed below.)

37. American University Washington College of Law, Admissions, online: <http://www.wcl.american.edu/ admissions.cfm>.