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51 J. Legal Educ. 520 (2001)
Teaching Foreign LL.M. Students about U.S. Legal Scholarship

handle is hein.journals/jled51 and id is 530 raw text is: Teaching Foreign LL.M. Students About U.S. Legal Scholarship Matthew A. Edwards In recent years U.S. law schools have welcomed an ever-increasing number of foreign-trained lawyers into our graduate law programs, enriching our communities and altering our conception of legal education. This influx has created responsibilities for those of us who teach foreign LL.M. students. In addition to the substantive subjects that we cover, we also have an obligation to let them know what is expected of them if they are to succeed in U.S. law schools. Typically law schools respond to these needs by giving guided tours of the library and holding panel discussions or presentations on basic matters like exam preparation, outlining, case briefing, the Socratic method, and the utility of study groups. Unfortunately we often neglect to address the most challenging task that faces these students. Soon after they arrive, many will be asked to write lengthy seminar papers that must meet the minimum standards of original legal scholarship. But foreign students, who come from a wide range of political, social, and educational backgrounds, may not understand the dominant forms of discourse between scholars and others in the U.S. legal profession.' In plainer terms, they may not know how U.S. legal scholars talk with each other, which my experience shows is difficult to learn by osmosis alone. Absent an adequate understanding of the role of U.S. legal scholarship, many foreign students' papers are overly descriptive and insufficiently prescriptive. And nothing frustrates a teacher more than reading papers that spend an inordi- nate amount of time summarizing vast areas of doctrine, and too little time proposing convincing solutions to the problems presented by incoherent or unjust doctrine. The purpose of this essay is rather modest: I will encourage all graduate law programs for foreign students to provide a two-hour discussion of the pur- poses and forms of U.S. legal scholarship. I have devised an in-class demon- stration to guide this discussion. This reasonable investment of class time Matthew A. Edwards is an instructor in the LL.M. Program in ComparativeJurisprudence at New York University. I am deeply grateful to Norman Dorsen, Frank KR Upham, and Harry T. Edwards, who read an earlier version of this essay and made a number of valuable suggestions. I. SeeJillJ. Ramsfield, Is Logic Culturally Based? A Contrastive, International Approach to the U.S. Law Classroom, 47J. Legal Educ. 157, 158, 185-86 (1997). Journal of Legal Education, Volume 51, Number 4 (December 2001)

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