The specificity of American higher education

The possibility—and potential pitfalls—of an “Americanization” of European higher education are widely discussed. This paper argues that it is important to base comparisons and considerations of possible emulation on a stronger understanding of the specificity of American higher education. It stresses the importance of seeing this as a system with highly differentiated institutions and complex contextual relations. The present paper also summarizes dramatic changes that have transformed American higher education in recent years, and others that are beginning to transform it further. This shows the system to be internally dynamic and also influenced by important external conditions (including matters of finance, public policy, and new technology). The U.S. system is only understood well if analysis locates specific patterns in relation to these structural transformations. Such specificity should inform future comparative research

Critical Legal Studies versus Critical Legal Theory: A Comment on Method

Over the last decade the Conference on Critical Legal Studies (CCLS) has rekindled an important debate about the study of legal ideologies. The work by scholars within this movement is provocative because it demands that we take seriously the contradictory needs and ideological parameters of liberal legalism. The growing body of work associated with this movement has not, however, included a criticism of the ideological underpinnings of legal methods in general and doctrinal analysis in particular. We begin with the premise that scholarship must include a self-critical method. In Part I-The Political-Economic Constraints of Liberal Legal Scholarship-we explore why questions of methods, i.e. of how one asks and answers questions, has not been a central issue within CCLS. In Part /I-Reformulation of Method-we present a beginning toward a framework for developing a self-critical method for understanding legal ideologies