Thailand Law Journal 2010 Spring Issue 1 Volume 13

VI. CONCLUSION
As an Australian educated in Europe working for an American law school based in Asia, these reflections are of more than academic interest. The transformations driven by changes in the practice of the law, by the types of students pursuing degrees, and—somewhat belatedly—by research developments in the loosely defined area of "global law" have radically changed the nature of legal education. This is true even if not all law schools have recognised this, and these forces are going to continue exerting pressure as the notoriously protectionist world of lawyers becomes exposed to market forces. Professions such as law that have inherited the characteristics of guilds are notoriously resistant to change.⁵³ Yet, as we have seen, law has moved from internationalisation to transnationalisation, and then to globalisation in the space of about a generation each. Moving forward, some things will remain constant but many others will change.

One constant is that basic law degrees will remain within the province of individ­ual jurisdictions. (Similarly, admission to practice will continue to be controlled at the jurisdictional level—though there will be pressure from industry to liberalise the recognition of foreign-trained lawyers.) Nevertheless, the push for standardisation in the global market for legal talent will encourage more states to move in the direction of an American-style J.D. graduate law degree. England will probably remain an outlier with its three-year undergraduate programme, but a higher proportion of its students will seek graduate qualifications elsewhere. The content of the basic law degree will continue to emphasise the traditional subjects, but the move away from the memorisation of black-letter law will become irresistible: faculties will seek ways to ensure that their graduates are both intellectually and culturally flexible, capable of adapting not merely to new laws but to new jurisdictions. Comparative and international subjects will receive greater emphasis, with comparative and inter­national perspectives also being introduced to a wider range of subjects. There will be resistance, but not for long.⁵⁴

In addition, at least some international experience will increasingly be seen as essential to the practice of law at the upper echelons, with more law schools offering exchange and double-degree programmes. Early collaborations were transatlantic, but many future tie-ups will focus on Asia, recognising the important role that Asia now plays in economic terms and the role it will assume—eventually—in polit­ical and cultural terms.⁵⁵ A second locus will be the Gulf, offering enormous financial resources but less conducive to genuine partnership given the dearth of English-language scholarly institutions. As universities seek to take advantage of these opportunities, there is a danger of overstretching resources and diluting brand names: some partnerships will be established that work well for a couple of years but become unsustainable; other relationships that primarily exist on paper will eventu­ally be seen as compromising the reputation of one or both institutions. The push towards globalisation is unlikely to diminish, but there will be both successes and failures as law schools attempt to adapt.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once noted that "Mlle life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience."⁵⁶ Though he was speaking of the common law, this is at least partly true of legal education. Where universities are often the driving force of advances in areas of scientific research, professional schools frequently lag behind. Law's ambiguous status as both a professional qualification and a subject of serious research has seen it evolve fitfully, driven by the demands of the profession and the needs of students, with pedagogy often being more ex post justification than forward looking agenda. It is an exciting time to teach law, but an even more exciting time to study it.

53. Herbert M. Kritzer, "The Future Role of "Law Workers": Rethinking the Forms of Legal Practice and the Scope of Legal Frinc.-.I'.ion- (2002)44 Ariz. L. Rev. 917.

54. Compare Max Planck's observation that "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light. but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it". Quoted in Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1996) at 151.

55. See Kishore Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (New York: Public Affairs, 2008).

56. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., "Lecture I. in Mark DeWolfe Howe (ed.), The Common Law (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1962) 5.