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Born to be Wild: The “Trans-systemic” Programme at McGill and the De-Nationalization of Legal Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Helge Dedek  and
Armand de Mestral

Extract

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Legal education is changing. What is changing is our understanding of “education”, of how we learn and how we should teach. Also changing is our understanding of how to define what is “legal” about “legal education”. Most will nowadays agree that legal education should be more than a vocational training for the practice of the profession in a particular jurisdiction. In analyzing the development of legal education in recent years, we can distinguish two trajectories. Firstly, there is the ongoing attempt of specifically the North American legal academy to make legal studies a transdisciplinary endeavour, a development closely connected to the major “paradigm shifts” in legal theory in the 20th century. Secondly, it seems that jurisdictional boundaries have lost significance in an internationalized, globalized and post-regulatory environment. This calls into question the very notion of “law” itself, at least as traditionally understood as a system of posited norms within a given jurisdiction. How should both developments be reconciled?

Type
Section 3: ‘Inside-Out?’ Towards a Transnational Legal Education?
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 6-7: Following the Call of the Wild: The Promises and Perils of Transnationalizing Legal Education , July 2009 , pp. 889 - 912
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

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“ELFA-Resolution II/06: European Law Teachers

ELFA encourages a European dimension of legal teaching that presupposes an educational experience abroad as a desirable feature of the career of a law teacher. The same should also be true for the judiciary. Law schools should be encouraged to require for newly appointed law teachers to have studied law abroad for at least one semester. Studies abroad have become possible by means of the Socrates-Erasmus Programme. To require such an experience for law teachers appears as a logical consequence.

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