El. knyga: Globalization of Legal Education: A Critical Perspective

"Legal academics and practitioners in recent decades increasingly emphasize the so-called "globalization" of legal education. The diffusion of the Juris Doctor (JD) degree to Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea, as well as the advent of a very similar Juris Master (JM) degree in China and a shift in the late 1980s and beyond to a new, US-influenced format in India, exemplify shifts toward US legal education practices (Flood 2014). The global and Americanizing trend is evident on the web sites of law schools around the globe, with many law schools competing to be the most "global" in terms of their faculty, curricula, teaching methods, and students. Less pronounced but related to the literature on legal globalization is that on "transnationalization" and transnational processes, which is a strong component of the move toward globalization in legal education. As this book shows, if we look to see what is celebrated as part of globalized law schools and faculties, we see increased cross-border flowsof professors and students, teaching of transnational legal subjects, development of particular forms of teaching practice such as legal clinics, explicit focus on transnational rankings, and transnationalized scholarly communities sharing teaching and research methods and approaches across domains of law"--

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.