Slaughter, Anne-Marie

English

PennState, The Dickinson School of Law: Penn State Law eLibrary

Penn State International Law ReviewVolume 22Number 3 Penn State International Law Review Article 41-1-2004International Dimension of Law SchoolCurriculum, TheAnne-Marie SlaughterFollow this and additional works at: http://elibrary.law.psu.edu/psilrThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by Penn State Law eLibrary. It has been accepted for inclusion in Penn State International LawReview by an authorized administrator of Penn State Law eLibrary. For more information, please contact ram6023@psu.edu.Recommended CitationSlaughter, Anne-Marie (2004) "International Dimension of Law School Curriculum, The," Penn State International Law Review: Vol.22: No. 3, Article 4.Available at: http://elibrary.law.psu.edu/psilr/vol22/iss3/4The International Dimension of Law SchoolCurriculumAnne-Marie Slaughter*I. The Required Course DebateMembers of the American Society of International Law spend acertain amount of time at their annual meetings lamenting the fact thatpublic international law is not a required course in American law schoolsand debating how to make it a required course. The debate very quicklyturns to the bar and then to state bar associations because the fastest wayto ensure that a law school course is required is to put the subject on thebar exam. For a whole host of reasons, that is unlikely to happen.Rather than making international law a required course, law schoolsshould strongly recommend that students take such a course. Stronglyrecommending a course, as opposed to requiring it, is likely to be moreeffective. Students tend to dislike required courses, in part, because theyare required courses! I concur with the law schools that recommend fouror five courses after the first year, from constitutional law to tax, as partof the portfolio of any well-educated lawyer.' An international course,whether it is private, public, or hybrid, should be one of thoserecommended courses. Law schools should be sending the message toall law students that a working knowledge of international law should bea basic part of any lawyer's education in the 21 st century.II. What a Global Curriculum Should AchieveThe consensus among lawyers, CEOs, NGO activists, and others is* Anne-Marie Slaughter is Dean of the Princeton University Woodrow WilsonSchool of Public and International Affairs, formerly the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professorof International, Foreign and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School. Ms. Slaughterserves as President of the American Society of International Law. She has written or co-edited four books and more than 50 articles for scholarly and legal journals and is afrequent media commentator on international tribunals, terrorism and international law.1. Constitutional law, corporations, tax, and accounting; I would includeadministrative law. There might be some disagreement among law professors aboutwhich four or five fundamental courses students should be required to take.PENN STATE INTERNATIONAL LAW REVIEWthat the people whom they would most like to hire are those whounderstand how to navigate between cultures and who have at least somecultural competence. In a dream world, such competence would includeknowledge of at least one foreign language. At a minimum, it shouldinclude exposure to at least one foreign culture, through lots of coursesand, ideally, some actual travel abroad in the summer or in a semester.Law schools must train students to be boundary-crossers, literally andfiguratively.In addition to offering specific courses that focus on internationalsubjects or that include an international component, an important part ofinternationalization concerns the individuals who teach those courses.Law schools should be hiring boundary-crossers. Deans and members ofappointments committees, who spend many hours looking at a range ofcandidates and choosing the best, should be mindful of this dimension.Many potential candidates to fill these vacancies are now being educatedin the United States as S.J.D. candidates. 2 In many ways, they definecultural competence: they have completed an entire course of legaltraining in their home countries; have obtained an LL.M. degree at a lawschool in either the U.S. or a third country such as England, Canada, orFrance; and have now been admitted to a highly selective program topursue a Ph.D. in law. A growing number of these students are on theAmerican teaching market and are getting jobs. As teachers, these menand women automatically teach from multiple perspectives-Americanand foreign. They will not have to add a module on foreign perspectivesbecause it is simply the way they think.An even better approach is that described by Dean Vanistendael.3The students he is training embody an even higher ideal of what lawschools should produce. They will be taught in several languages; willspend at least a year in another country in addition to their own; and willstudy international foreign and comparative law in addition to nationallaw. These will be people who will automatically think from multipleperspectives. Educators thinking about this project from the point of bigintellectual ideas will want to teach students not only to be boundary-crossers, but to be cosmopolitan.Cosmopolitan is a word that can connote hopeless idealism. It can2. Harvard's S.J.D. (Doctor of Juridical Science) program has fifty S.J.D. studentsat any one time. Many other schools across the country also have distinguishedprograms. S.J.D. candidates are typically foreign students who have completed theirlegal training in another culture, have received an LL.M. degree, and, based on thatperformance, have been selected to spend an additional three to four years takingAmerican law school courses and writing dissertations.3. Frans Vanistendael is the Dean of the University of Leuven School of Law inBelgium. He is also a co-founder of the European Law Faculties Association.[Vol. 22:3THE INTERNATIONAL DIMENSIONhave very nasty associations of rootlessness. It has often been a coverfor anti-Semitism. The better and different version of cosmopolitanismis defined by philosopher Anthony Appiah who says:[A]s cosmopolitans, far from being disposed toward worldgovernment, we hold to a vision that accepts, even celebrates, thediversity of social and political systems in the world, taking pleasurein the existence and the products of peoples and places other than ourown homes. Thus, what is distinctive about cosmopolitans is that wedisplay our concern for our fellow humans without demanding ofthem that they become like ourselves.4Appiah also writes, "We expect to be able to learn from othersocieties as from others in our own societies.",5 This idea is a mind set,not a skill set or a knowledge set. Law school professors fundamentallyteach students to think like lawyers. A successful, global curriculumwould produce American lawyers who understand that thinking like alawyer also means thinking like a cosmopolitan.4. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The University in an Age of Globalization, Lecture atthe Princeton-Oxford Conference on Globalization at Oxford University (June 2002).5. Id.2004]

International Dimension of Law School Curriculum, The

https://elibrary.law.psu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1591&context=psilr

International Dimension of Law School Curriculum, The

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

PennState, The Dickinson School of Law: Penn State Law eLibrary