By Mary Kay Kane

In my Presidential Message last January, I identified as one of the challenges of the new century for the law professoriate the need to consider and shape our teaching and scholarship in light of the globalization trends that are so prevalent in the economy and the legal profession itself. How best can we prepare our graduates to practice in a world without borders? What contributions can we make and what collaborative opportunities can we take advantage of as scholars to share knowledge and expand understanding of the rule of law throughout the world? The need to create partnerships and develop shared understandings across country borders has been underscored in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The immediate efforts and focus necessarily have been political and governmental. A longer range and just as critical need is to establish a broader and continued dialogue and understanding of our shared principles as well as differences and to develop the means to foster cooperative private and public endeavors as part of the global community. Thus, I thought I would take the opportunity in this, my last column in the AALS Newsletter, to expand a bit further on the kinds of things that are going on or are in the planning stages to try to address and prepare for these changes.

Turning first to teaching, we already see many changes occurring both in the United States and in other countries as well. Law schools across the United States have been responding to globalization trends with the introduction of new and advanced courses in the international and comparative law areas to their curricula. Indeed, in an AALS Curriculum Survey done a short time ago, it was found that the single largest growth areas by far in law school curricula in the last five years has been in the international and comparative law fields. Schools also increasingly have invited foreign law faculty as visiting teachers, or, sometimes, in more permanent relationships as affiliated faculty or in joint appointments, to share their expertise with our American students and colleagues. And who could ignore the flowering of summer programs abroad, which offer students the opportunity to learn of different legal systems at the source? Even more recently, serious exploration and discussions have begun to consider how and what international law aspects should be integrated in the traditional courses offered throughout the curriculum. Thus, at the 2001 Annual Meeting, one of the mini-workshops at the start of the meeting focused on just such efforts. And at the 2002 Annual Meeting a joint all-day program of the Sections on Africa, Comparative Law, Deans, Graduate Programs for Foreign Lawyers, International Law, International Legal Exchange and North American Cooperation, entitled ?Continuing Progress in Internationalizing Legal Education?Twenty-First Century Global Challenges,? will continue that inquiry.

Interestingly, as American legal education thus embarks on this program to reach out and broaden our standard law curriculum, several other countries also are engaged in some fundamental rethinking of their legal education systems and how they should be adapted to better prepare their graduates for a profession that increasingly will be working outside their own country?s borders.

For example, in Europe, a 1999 Joint Declaration of the European Ministers of Education (called the ?Bologna Declaration?) requires universities to consider how they can adopt common standards or a curriculum so that the training of law students and graduates of the different member countries can be sufficiently similar to encourage and allow for the free flow of students and, ultimately, practicing lawyers throughout the European Community. The goal is to achieve greater compatibility and comparability in the systems of higher education and to increase the competitiveness of European institutions of higher education in a global economy. Their deadline for implementing those standards is 2010.

Further, recognizing the importance of encouraging comparative understanding beyond Europe, the European Law Faculty Association (ELFA), which was founded in 1995 and is a representative organization with membership from nearly half of the Law Faculties of all European countries, and the AALS have agreed to cosponsor a conference for law faculty of our respective groups in summer 2003 dealing with the ?Teaching of Private International Law.? The specific plans for the conference are just now being developed, but the general objective is to allow faculty from Europe and the United States to share legal developments in their respective countries in a variety of subject areas so as to foster new ideas and shared exchanges that may be useful both in the classroom, as well as in possible scholarly endeavors.

Finally, the AALS is planning to sponsor a second Global Conference to take place in 2004, as a follow up to our 2000 La Pietra Conference. The first conference focused on structural matters and attempted to develop a better understanding of the existing legal education systems around the world. The second conference will focus directly on the ideas and issues surrounding how to develop a global curriculum and whether we can develop a shared vision of how best to educate our law students to practice and be engaged in transactions crossing all borders.

So, much has been and is being done to respond to the impact of globalization on the profession and to consider how we should adapt our teaching and our curricula in light of these pressures. Necessarily, there is no one answer, nor is it possible to identify the full range of effective responses that may emerge. But the process of examination has begun and clearly will continue in the years ahead.

Excellent teaching and scholarship necessarily are intertwined and some of the trends I have just mentioned in connection with the classroom provide similar opportunities for broadening scholarship and encouraging cross-border scholarly exchanges. There clearly is a heightened interest in gaining a better understanding of how other legal systems approach shared problems or transactions. For years we have had serious American legal scholars who have devoted their careers to comparative and international law research. But just as in the classroom it is being suggested that teachers offering courses in various aspects of United States law might incorporate some elements reflecting a comparative perspective, scholars in various law fields are finding opportunities to expand their substantive knowledge across national borders and are beginning to study how other legal systems handle comparable issues. Rather than seeing comparative scholarship as emanating from ?comparativists,? we now see scholars in property, procedure, environmental law, evidence, constitutional law, and criminal law expanding the scope of their studies to consider how other systems treat comparable issues and thus, attempting to analyze more deeply why approaches we might take may or should differ in light of our circumstances.

But the real potential for enhancing our shared knowledge and ideas for how law is and should develop to handle the problems of an interconnected world is tied to technology. Technology offers the possibility of global scholarly exchanges that may occur with relative ease. It also offers the vision of more economical and accessible legal materials from around the world. Data bases are being constructed to collect legal materials that before were hard to find and extremely costly to acquire and thus often not available to most libraries either here or abroad. In this way, the potential scope and depth of our research will be enhanced. Additionally, technological networks of scholars are beginning to emerge, allowing for vigorous and virtually contemporaneous scholarly discussions and critiques and thereby expanding the kind of thoughtful review and discussion that underlie serious scholarship. The impact of technology on legal scholarship generally is just starting to be seen and its potential to further the internationalization of legal scholarship is something to look forward to. The fact that it will happen cannot be doubted. The key at this stage is to learn what is available so as to be able to take advantage of the advances and opportunities technology offers when they emerge. Thus, one of the Plenary Sessions at the 2002 Annual Meeting is devoted to Technology and Scholarship in an effort to describe both some of the existing possibilities in the e-publishing world, as well as to explore what may be coming in the future.

There clearly are exciting possibilities ahead and we are well poised to take advantage of them. Globalization trends outside the academy offer unprecedented opportunities for law teachers and scholars to contribute to fostering greater understanding of the principles and means by which we all can live and work in peace and harmony.

* This article appeared in the November 2001 AALS Newsletter