The Globalization of Legal Education: A Critical Perspective

This book, with contributors from nine countries, seeks to critically understand the processes of legal education reform and resistance and to point to what these processes mean for law and lawyers inside and outside of the United States. The book seeks to understand the forces driving these processes and to evaluate their implications. Its substantive chapters provide critical insights into how these transnational processes operate in different jurisdictions around the world in light of globalization and local competition. Taken together, the chapters show how institutions and practices of legal education have historically moved across jurisdictions and shaped legal education practices transnationally, as well as the challenges and limits these processes have faced. The chapters also show how that diffusion relates to empires and imperial competition, and in particular today to the rise in power of the United States after the Cold War-and the related diffusion of neoliberal economic policies that have also fueled the spread of corporate law firms modeled on the United States. The book shows how local processes play and evolve in relation to global balances of power.