Overview

Legal academics and practitioners in recent decades increasingly emphasize the so-called globalization" of legal education. The diffusion of the Juris Doctor (JD) degree to Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea, as well as the advent of a very similar Juris Master (JM) degree in China and a shift in the late 1980s and beyond to a new, US-influenced format in India, exemplify shifts toward US legal education practices (Flood 2014). The global and Americanizing trend is evident on the web sites of law schools around the globe, with many law schools competing to be the most "global" in terms of their faculty, curricula, teaching methods, and students. Less pronounced but related to the literature on legal globalization is that on "transnationalization" and transnational processes, which is a strong component of the move toward globalization in legal education. As this book shows, if we look to see what is celebrated as part of globalized law schools and faculties, we see increased cross-border flows of professors and students, teaching of transnational legal subjects, development of particular forms of teaching practice such as legal clinics, explicit focus on transnational rankings, and transnationalized scholarly communities sharing teaching and research methods and approaches across domains of law"--