Gevurtz, F A; Carter, L E; Davies, J A; Landsberg, B K; Main, T O; Malloy, M P; Sprankling, J G --- "Report Regarding the Pacific McGeorge Workshop on Globalising the Law School Curriculum" [2006] LegEdDig 20; (2006) 14(4) Legal Education Digest 4

Report Regarding the Pacific McGeorge Workshop on Globalising the Law School Curriculum

F A Gevurtz, L E Carter, J A Davies, B K Landsberg, T O Main, M P Malloy & J G Sprankling

[2006] LegEdDig 20; (2006) 14(4) Legal Education Digest 4

19 Global Bus & Devel L J 1, 2005, pp 1–64

For many years, the curriculum at most law schools has included courses addressing issues in international, transnational and comparative law. These courses, however, traditionally have been electives, and only a fraction of law school graduates have taken such electives. In order to design curricular changes to ensure that the vast majority, if not all, of law school graduates have exposure to issues of international, transnational and comparative law, the Pacific McGeorge Center for Global Business and Development decided to organise a workshop.

The participants at the workshop were invited based upon two criteria: they are leading professors in one of the seven subjects traditionally considered to make up most of the core law school curriculum — Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Corporations, Criminal Law and Procedure, Property and Torts — and (or) they have expertise in international, transnational or comparative law.

Most of the participants favoured introducing international and comparative law issues into the required curriculum for the purpose, at least in part, of improving student understanding and application of domestic law; indeed for many participants this was the reason for such an initiative. This rationale reflects the governing tenet among law professors that students will have an impoverished understanding and ability to apply the law, even as currently adopted in a single jurisdiction, without being aware of alternatives to the current law in the jurisdiction. Exploring alternatives allows students to see that human societies face common problems and that there are often multiple ways in which the law can address those problems. This counteracts the tendency among law students to assume that rules currently adopted in their jurisdiction are necessarily the only, or at least the best, way to address an issue.

A second rationale for introducing international, transnational and comparative law issues into the core curriculum came from the view of many participants that increasing globalisation makes it likely that a substantial proportion of law school graduates will confront future situations in which they must deal with such issues. However, this engendered disagreement among the participants. There were two bases for this disagreement. The first involved the question of what proportion of future attorneys will confront such issues. Many participants believed that this might depend upon the student profile and geographic location of each law school. A second basis for this disagreement was more fundamental insofar as it reflected different educational philosophies, rather than different empirical assessments. Many participants, at least to varying degrees, were of the view that the purpose of legal education was to develop analytical skills, rather than to teach students any particular set of legal rules.

On the whole, the participants agreed that law schools could not hope to provide students with sufficient details concerning international, transnational and comparative law issues — at least through core courses, rather than in specialised electives — so that graduates could address such issues based upon coverage in law school. Rather, as is also true with many, if not most, issues in domestic law introduced in core courses, the goal is to warn students that the issues exist so that graduates are on notice to research issues instead of missing them. In this role, knowledge of international and comparative law might make graduates less insular in their outlook on the world and on the US role in the world.

The second session of the workshop addressed methods for introducing international, transnational and comparative law issues into the core curriculum in order to meet the goals outlined in the first session. This session operated on two levels. On a macro level, the session considered the broad curricular question of whether to introduce international, transnational and comparative law issues through a separate course or courses devoted to these topics, or whether to introduce these issues through coverage in what traditionally have been domestically focused core courses. On a micro level, seven break-out discussion groups composed of participants who taught the same core subjects explored what issues could be introduced into their core courses.

The possible advantages of a required course in Transnational Law are that it ensures coverage of basic concepts in international and transnational law in a manner that avoids the gaps and duplication possible in a pervasive approach; it uses professors expert in international and transnational law, instead of domestically oriented professors, to cover these topics; and it avoids adding additional coverage to already burdened domestic core courses. Among the disadvantages of the required course in Transnational Law are that it adds a required course to the curriculum at a time in which faculties generally favour reducing the number of required courses. The consensus of the participants was that, in an ideal world, law schools would combine both the required course in Transnational Law with the pervasive introduction of international, transnational, and comparative law issues throughout the traditionally domestically oriented core courses.

In the third session of the workshop, the participants sought to identify, and then develop strategies to overcome, obstacles to implementing the ideas devised in the second session for introducing international, transnational and comparative law issues into the core curriculum. These discussions produced a list of eight basic challenges confronting efforts to introduce these issues into the core curriculum, as well as a number of suggestions for how to deal with each challenge listed.

The first challenge identified by the participants was the need to provide faculty with incentives to introduce these issues into the core curriculum. Four factors suggested to participants that many faculty teaching core courses would be hesitant to introduce them into their courses. The second challenge identified by the participants was the need to provide students with incentives in order to overcome opposition from many students to the introduction of international, transnational and comparative law into the core curriculum. The third challenge was the need to provide incentives for the leadership in the law school to support this addition to the core curriculum in the face of conflicting pressures for law school resources and attention.

The fourth challenge was the need to overcome the limited time faculty have in core courses to cover domestic material, let alone add international, transnational, and comparative law issues. Participants identified a number of strategies for dealing with time constraints. The fifth challenge identified by the participants was the need to familiarise faculty teaching core courses with international, transnational and comparative law (both generally and as specifically related to their core subjects) to the degree sufficient to make faculty comfortable adding coverage of these law issues to their courses.

Were we confident of our reasons for thinking that most students should be exposed to international, transnational and comparative law issues, so that we could engage in a dialogue with faculty, students and administrators who questioned not simply the practicality of introducing such issues into the core curriculum, but whether it was even appropriate to do so? The consensus of the group from the beginning of the workshop until the end was that such issues are an entirely appropriate part of the core curriculum.