The Globalization of Legal Education
![handle is hein.journals/sjls2008 and id is 60 raw text is: Singapore Journal of Legal Studies
[2008] 58-67
THE GLOBALISATION OF LEGAL EDUCATION
SIMON CHESTERMAN*
This article examines the evolution of legal education as it has moved through international, transna-
tional, and now global paradigms. It explores these paradigms by reference to practice, pedagogy,
and research. Intemationalisation saw the world as an archipelago of jurisdictions, with a small
number of lawyers involved in mediating disputes between jurisdictions or determining which juris-
diction applied; transnationalisation saw the world as a patchwork, with greater need for familiarity
across jurisdictions and hence a growth in exchanges and collaborations; globalisation is now seeing
the world as a web in more ways than one, with lawyers needing to be comfortable in multiple
jurisdictions.
I. INTRODUCTION
[L]aw is a science, and ... all the available materials of that science are contained
in printed books. ... We have also constantly inculcated the idea that the library
is the proper workshop of professors and students alike; that it is to us all that the
laboratories of the university are to the chemists and physicists, the museum of
natural history to the zoologists, the botanical garden to the botanists.
Christopher Columbus Langdell,
Dean of Harvard Law School, 18871
Students trained under the Langdell system are like future horticulturalists confin-
ing their studies to cut flowers, like architects who study pictures of buildings and
nothing else. They resemble prospective dog breeders who never see anything
but stuffed dogs. And it is beginning to be suspected that there is some correlation
between that kind of stuffed-dog study and the over-production of stuffed shirts
in the legal profession.
Jerome Frank,
Report to the Alumni Advisory Board of the
University of Chicago Law School, 19322
Global Professor and Director of the New York University School of Law Singapore Programme; Associate
Professor, National University of Singapore Faculty of Law. This is a revised and expanded version of
a paper presented at the International Bar Association annual conference held in Singapore in October
2007. Many thanks to Richard J. Goldstone, Tan Cheng Han, and Stanley Yeo for their comments on an
earlier version. I have also profited from discussing these issues with, among others, Benedict Kingsbury,
Richard Stewart, and Joseph Weiler. Many thanks to Nicolis Lozada for invaluable research assistance.
Christopher Columbus Langdell, The Harvard Law School (1887) 3 L.Q.R. 123 at 124.
2 Jerome Frank, Why Not a Clinical Lawyer-School? (1932) 81 U. Pa. L. Rev. 907 at 912.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/sjls2008&div=6&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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