The Spirit of Modern Academic Legal Education: Towards Governing Principles

The contribution promotes the idea of principles in academic legal education. Principles are taken to be abstract notions that can offer a certain direction of things in academic legal education. The paper posits that such principles should be taken into account both in the designing and the implementation of programmes of legal study and law degrees in the academic environment. Law is, of course, to this day, a largely divided discipline, especially considering that law has traditionally been in the hands of nation-states. By extension, legal education around the world may be perceived as largely divided too, because the discipline of law has been divided in the first place. However, the proposed principles are ones that ought to come with certain universal characteristics to them. Equally, they should also make allowance for certain local variation where possible, albeit not always and not necessarily. Recognition is also given to the fact that such a degree of local variation could be more significant where such could be justifiably supported by a domestic academic legal community and/or a domestic professional class of legal practitioners. Furthermore, the contribution offers specific examples of principles which can function as overall guiding principles for university law degrees around the world. The paper concludes with an overview of its main findings

The Multicultural Classroom as a Comparative Law Site: A United Kingdom Perspective

This chapter studies the impact of the recent multicultural approach to comparative legal studies on comparative law teaching, with a focus on British debates and literature. I will argue that the multicultural turn of (comparative) legal teaching, reflected for example in a greater diversity of teaching techniques, a greater emphasis on minority issues and law &… disciplines, responds to a multiplicity of motivations. Pedagogically, it is a response to the increasingly diverse backgrounds of students and their differing intellectual starting-points. Pragmatically, it is a means to boost students’ employability and intellectual versality in a job market that now values “cultural awareness skills”. Finally, conceptually, it is a tool designed to unravel the pluralistic nature of law. From these diverse drivers to the multicultural turn in (comparative) legal teaching, it is possible to identify similarities with other recent trends of globalisation and internationalisation of legal education. However, this article will submit that differences remain. Having analysed these differences, I will go on to argue and reveal that in them lie the core features of a multicultural approach to legal teaching and its intrinsic connections to comparative law, as the multicultural classroom itself becomes a comparative law site

The Concept of Legal Convergence

The concept of convergence of legal systems stands for a leading idea in the modern discipline of law. Whereas one could neo-romantically still perceive law as a Landesjurisprudenz, a sort of provincial and domestic study, it would be fair to maintain that, after the end of the Second World War, the concept of legal convergence of systems has become of paramount importance in the national, the regional and the international sphere. The discipline of law has, thus, effectively departed from its narrower and more nation-oriented roots post the 1648 Westphalian paradigm, albeit not always and not necessarily. Concurrently, the phenomenon of convergence of legal systems has had wide-ranging implications in the political, legal and economic life of the world’s modern republics. Even systems which would resist convergence projects initially, would eventually subscribe to such projects (contagion theory of legal systems). The magnificence of such a leading idea as the concept of legal convergence arises from no other reason than the fact that convergence is a multifaceted, multimodal and flexible phenomenon. Convergence of legal systems can, therefore, occur either through centralised or decentralised modes (top-down and bottom-up legal convergence). Close to this, one would be reminded that a thing is beautiful, in that it partakes in beauty itself. And a system tends to benefit from a convergence circle, in that convergence is something that tends to come with benefits for systems that partake in such a circle. Indeed, in its ideal form, the concept of legal convergence can be either an organic self-perfecting, self-evolving reality or a constantly updated centrally designed project. The Platonic ideal of the one effectively amounts to nothing else but a yearning for simplicity, as Merryman put it, our world frequently presenting us with a rather chaotic, disorderly and perplexing state of affairs in so many aspects of human existence. Law, traditionally, despite its formalist and modernist credentials, has added to this rather chaotic world with its nationalist and inward-looking deviations. Almost any of Kafka’s works would readily point to this direction. The chapter recognises that there were times when law would be a synonym to the nation (and vice versa); yet, the new world legal and economic architecture that arose out of the ashes of a bloodstained and torn humanity more than seventy years ago was actually engineered on the premises of international legal and political cooperation. Finally, against the background of the economic and financial crisis, that is with us for more than a decade now, this contribution explores the essence of the idea of legal convergence by recognising amongst other things the relation of legal convergence to economic convergence in the industrial world. It further attempts to assess the feasibility of genuine legal convergence projects by referring to leading examples of legal harmonisation in Europe and the world and by exploring the theory of legal transplants, the theory that acts as the cornerstone of the modern legal convergence thesis. The chapter concludes on the need for the greater democratic legitimacy of convergence projects, especially when it comes to ones that would not be the result of organic decentralised growth but of central design