Vol. 10 No. 2 (February 2000) pp. 103-105

THE LAW SCHOOL: GLOBAL ISSUES, LOCAL QUESTIONS by Fiona Cownie (Editor). Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 1999. 260 pp.

Reviewed by John Brigham, Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

This is a collection of research on legal education by scholars from England, Australia, Quebec and Italy. The authors are members of a subsection of the Working Group on the Legal Profession of the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law of the International Sociological Association. For many this way of situating the work will fail to enthrall, but perhaps that would be anyone who has been reading non-social science literature lately. However, I have actually been reading real literature during the last few days, and I'm still drawn to this project. I didn't know the background when I agreed to review this material but I believe that this is an influential group. It is very English but with links to the American Bar Foundation. It is an international body that is different from, but associated with, the American Law and Society Association constitutes the group. There is indeed a legitimate social science quality to the work. The forward by Professor Cownie proposes that there are common concerns shared by legal educators no matter where in the world they come from. She says the study of legal education has been marginalized in favor of substantive areas (like torts or jurisprudence I presume). She sees the work in the volume as a consequence of the professionalization of legal education research. This is said to make it harder to ignore the work of the legal educator. As one not teaching in a law school, which the scholars here identify as law teaching, I would have preferred a more dynamic beginning situating teaching in a professional context as an aspect of the larger enterprise of teaching about law. For years the claimed distinctiveness of "professional" legal education, what is done in law schools, has been the basis of efforts to separate that form of law teaching from teaching law to undergraduates, in high school, in professional continuing education settings or even informally teaching law. Widespread acceptance of the picture of law teaching as a professional activity has been a key to the modern constitution of the legal profession. This is a very recent development.

I am reminded of the last time I was asked, in the midst of a discussion of the Puerto Rican judiciary during a research trip to San Juan, whether I "was law trained". I have become familiar with the question but have also taught myself to find it odd on the basis of thirty years of law study and writing. This time the question was posed without arrogance but out of curiosity. However, my colleague's curiosity was born of the notion that to teach law in a law school is different in important ways from teaching law in other places. It was something I first became aware of in 1980 as Critical Legal Studies began to focus inwardly on the law school condition rather than the conditions of society under law. This was to be the end of a broad left wing

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movement in law in favor of a much harder to rationalize left wing movement in elite professional institutions. My response to the question has usually been to claim that I study lawyers from the outside. Since that can be off putting, I may simply say I have been doing this work long enough not to have been expected to go to law school. Yet, it is for this development, their increasing power to reoccupy and narrow the inquiry into law, that law schools are indeed interesting. I always wonder, in a reversal of the classic question, whether this is the sort of interesting issue that is likely to be engaged by scholars on the inside. And, tangentially, this reviewer wonders what is to be made of global claims generated by scholars primarily from England and almost completely from within the British Empire. On the other hand, it is stunning, though refreshing, to find a research group without a large and inevitably noisy American contingent. Although there are no American authors in this volume, the work of William Felstiner is in the background. The book treats an array of topics such as legal education as liberal education (Bradney), law school as schooling for citizenship (Brownsword), the search for theory in teaching (Cownie), consideration of various reports examining the current state of legal education (Hillyer), law in the European community (Olgiati), and the influence of the legal profession on legal education (Thomasset and Laperriere). Three chapters call attention to the utility of a broad economic approach to legal education. I am drawn to this useful aspect of the collection. These are Andrew Goldsmith's "Standing at the Crossroads," John Flood's "Legal Education, Globalization, and the New Imperialism," and Julian Webb's "Post-Fordism and the Reformation of Liberal Legal Education." These chapters explore economic themes that do not often make it into the study of legal scholarship with exceptions such as the work of Maureen Cain and Christine Harrington, Robert Gordon, Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth. The last two are cited in the collection. The first deserves more attention than it gets in the Cownie volume on the basis of its hard-hitting materialism alone even if it were not for other considerations. Goldsmith, a sociologist of law in the legal studies tradition in Australia, draws our attention to the power/knowledge relation that he describes as tying ".our knowledge of the world to particular social interests and the exercise of power" (p. 62). With the effort to tie knowledge to interests as a compass it is hard to imagine going too far wrong in the study of schooling in law.

Flood's chapter draws attention to imperialism in legal education and this is perhaps the highest form of social interest. He exemplifies the imperialism of the law school by reference to the New York University (NYU) Law School and it's "Global Law School" enterprise. The extension of American law around the globe deserves to be placed in between Goldsmith's power/knowledge relation and the commodification of law suggested by Webb. Commodification, in the post-Fordist sense, makes law part of the cultural capital that is globalized. The global legal project has roots in law and in the academy. It draws on the imperial proclivities of Anglo-American jurisprudence but its most significant contemporary developments depend on the claim of modern law that it is a distinctive body of knowledge and has a special place in the academy.

The NYU Law School, justifiably described as in the forefront of this global

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enterprise, wraps its project in the aspirations of the academy to learn more. In New York City, "the financial center of the world" according to Bloomberg Radio, and at the law school, money and a liberal vision of the academy drive the global enterprise. As with the other aspects of the global reach of the contemporary American empire, the Internet, constitutionalism and markets, all the implications are not happy ones. Here, professional legal education is in sync with the larger Anglo-American academy, which has eagerly embraced the global prospect. The impact of law in the academy goes far beyond that contemplated by the public spirited if entrepreneurial law professors pushing the global legal project. Although initially expressed in terms of a wholesome internationalism with only a tinge of eagerness to expand its market share at the expense of the Ivy Leagues, this vanguard project at NYU Law School consumes the distinct and foreign in the interest of growing a robust lex Americana. While the global in law is clearly tied to particular social interests, it is knowledge and its institutions, particularly the academic setting of the modern law school, which makes the global expansion of law appear so attractive.


Copyright 2000 by the author.