ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates transnational programs in which legal education unfolds in both the U.S. and in other countries. The discussion is informed by two critical questions in the globalization of legal education. First, how can we render visible mostly invisible patterns of interaction that deploy power in inchoate forms (Herzfeld 2015)? Second, do these transnational programs sustain the “imperial process” that Garth (2015) suggests governs the internationalization of legal education and, if so, what are its patterns of import and export? The chapter draws upon ethnographic research and interviews with U.S. law faculty from two non-elite law schools, one in the Midwest and one on the East Coast, about their experiences teaching foreign attorneys enrolled in their international LL.M. programs in which students earn a master’s degree in law. In these programs, teaching international students how to think, speak, and act like U.S. lawyers differs dramatically depending upon the context of instruction. There are three differentiated contexts: 1) classes taught in the students’ countries of origin; 2) classes specifically designed for international law students but taught in the faculty members’ home institutions; and 3) other classes in which the primary audience is U.S. JD students. For each site, there is an examination of how faculty manage the content of the courses they are teaching, what they “do” about the language of instruction, which pedagogical styles they choose, how they examine their students, and how they feel about who belongs in which classes. Different bureaucratic and structural constraints operate in separate contexts, re-working the actors’ presumptions of power, reconstructing the agency of administrators, instructors, and pupils, and enabling myriad forms of resistance. The study of transnational education captures the parallels, tensions, and intersections between the local and the global.
