Comparative law has a long history, and it has long been a tradition among legal scholars to compare one legal system with others. Even in the days when Rome ruled the so-called “known world”, there were other legal systems which existed either with the Roman Empire, side-by-side with the Roman jus civilis, or outside the Empire in the German tribes, in the Parthian Empire, among the Celts, and so forth. Law is the element which regulates and harmonizes human activity, behavior, and endeavor within any ordered society, primitive or advanced, and few if any societies could exist for long without some sort of law and legal system. Law is therefore part of the culture, the daily life, behavior, civilization, and yes, even the history of a people and their civilization. Unless a civilization or folk-group is a carbon copy of another, then it is normal to expect differences in the manner in which rights are vindicated, differences resolved, and an orderly solution found for the conflicts in human life.

Rogelio Pérez Perdomo is a Professor of Law at the Central University of Venezuela and an active member of the Latin American Council of Law and Development. A longstanding student of the purposes and methods of legal education, he has also made a special point to acquire knowledge about legal education in Europe and the United States.

In this article Professor Pérez Perdomo discusses the inadequacies and shortcomings of the existing legal education programs in Latin America. He recognizes the growing awareness of such inadequacies on the part of many Latin American law teachers, and their dissatisfaction with the traditional systems and methods of law teaching. This dissatisfaction has generated many studies and discussions in the different Latin American countries, and it has also produced some changes and improvements. Professor Pérez Perdomo believes, however, that such changes fall significantly short of modern needs of adequate legal education. Concentrating on the situation in Venezuela, he compares it with current legal education innovations and developments in other Latin American countries, as well as in the major European countries and the United States.

Professor Pérez Perdomo clearly admits his preference for further reforms of the legal education methods and programs in Venezuela (and, presumably, in other countries of Latin America). He views, however, student unrests as an invalid reason for such reforms because improvements must emerge from substantive needs rather than the temporary considerations of political expediency. Reforms must proceed from an appreciation of the true role of law and the legal profession.

In a brief survey of the traditional and modern role of the law, especially its use as a vehicle for social and economic development, Professor Pérez Perdomo demonstrates the significance of their impact on legal education. Equally important, in his opinion, is the influence of foreign financial aid, e.g., the Ford Foundation, the International Legal Center, etc., which must have had a considerable impact on the emergence of new legal education trends. The effect of such influences has not yet been evaluated, but it is an important topic in any study of the effectiveness and desirability of international transfers of educational methods from one country to another. Thus, the United States legal education model encountered many difficulties in Latin America when the attempt was made to apply it there, and it can be used there only in a limited sense and in a significantly modified form.

Professor Pérez Perdomo notes the following trends of legal education reform in Latin America:

1. 1) The reorganization and “semestization” of law courses.

2. 2) The use of new teaching methods–tutorials, class discussions, working groups, and legal clinics–by various law schools in their efforts to enrich the content of their educational programs.

3. 3) The identification of the purposes and responsibilities of legal education in coordination with the general aims of law and the legal system.

Professor Pérez Perdomo recognizes that many of these aspirations for reform are seriously affected by such factual limitations as, for example, the unfavorable numerical ratio of students to law faculty, inadequate teaching abilities of the professors, poverty and the small size of libraries, and the encumbersome administrative organization and fiscal procedure of universities. Despite these difficulties, Professor Pérez Perdomo is confident that the reform efforts will prevail and that many salutory improvements will eventually become evident in Latin American legal education.

Copyright is a monopoly conferred upon authors or creators of literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works to produce, reproduce, adapt, or perform their works for a limited time. The Copyright Law, by conferring this monopoly upon authors and their assignees, provides an economic incentive “to those with the requisite ability to create intellectual property” and to “publishers, recording firms, and similar enterprises to package and distribute these intellectual creations to the general public.” Prior to the invention of the printing press the possibility of commercial gain from the production of intellectual property was severely limited by the drudgery involved in manual copying of manuscripts, which work was performed by slaves in ancient times and monks under a vow of obedience later. Private patrons and universities provided the only economic incentive to authors to produce intellectual property and the book trade was small. Although both law and literature existed in abundance in ancient and medieval Europe, Copyright Law was unknown.

Copyright statutes have traditionally dealt primarily with questions related to reproduction of writings by the printing press. Since the previous general revision of United States copyright law in 1909, a variety of technological advances such as the phonograph, the tape recorder, radio, television, the photocopier, and the computer have generated other copyright issues. The need for a new law which would resolve these questions led to five years of Congressionally-funded study of copyright in the 1950's. Thirty-four separate reports came out of this research. In the 1960's the Register of Copyrights, in consultation with copyright attorneys and experts, drafted a general revision bill. The Copyright Office modified this draft and had it introduced in Congress in 1965. Although it did not pass at that time, it became the basis for copyright revisions introduced in subsequent sessions of Congress. The U.S. House of Representatives passed a copyright bill in 1967 but the Senate did not act on the proposal. In 1974 the Senate passed a copyright bill but it failed in the House. Not until 1976 were draftsmen able to write a law acceptable to both legislative bodies. The President approved the act on October 19, 1976, and most provisions of the law became effective on January 1, 1978.

The Federal Republic of Germany, including West Berlin, has some 9,000 commercial enterprises engaged in publishing and book distribution. Of these, 2,268 are Verlage (publishing houses) located in 480 cities and 6,672 are Buchhandlungen (bookstores) in 1,585 cities. By far the largest number of the better-known enterprises are concentrated in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich and Stuttgart. Most publishing houses are small to medium-sized. In 1975 one-third produced only one imprint a year. Three-quarters of all publishers produced between one and ten imprints a year. Only 3 per cent of all publishers produced between 51 to 100 imprints a year and 2.6 per cent more than 100 imprints. Approximately 70 per cent of all publishers have a yearly turnover of up to one million DM and 70 per cent of the bookstores have a turnover of up to DM 500,000. Some 60 publishing houses have placed emphasis in their production on works dealing with law and public administration. Between 100 to 200 bookstores specialize in the distribution of this literature.