A recent article in Foreign Policy touts the benefits of an education abroad. It’s cheap! It’s less competitive! U.S. students can learn a language! The teaching environment is better! All these great benefits are available to any enterprising undergraduate who’s willing to move a bit farther from mom and dad than most. It sounds like a deal that’s too good to be true.
That deal isn’t available to law students. That’s because admission to most state bars require potential attorneys to graduate from a law school accredited by the American Bar Association. And the ABA doesn’t accredit foreign law schools. So that’s that. (Well, except for those Americans that go to another country for law school and simply stay in that country after graduation.)
But should that really be the end of the story? Putting aside all the fluffy nonsense about the “increasing globalization” of law, foreign law schools present a possible solution to two perceived problems in the legal market right now: (1) the lack of attorneys for under-served (read: poor) populations and (2) the high cost of law school in general. Of course, these problems are related: students carrying high debt loads out of law school simply can’t afford to move to Barrow and set up shop.
The ABA has considered and declined to accredit foreign law schools one time before. Reading between the lines, the earlier refusal seemed to have stemmed from a fear that foreign lawyers would flood the market.
Yet that concern seems inconsistent with the ABA’s willingness to accept American law schools of all shapes and sizes, with seemingly no concern for “flooding the market.” And interestingly, neither the commenters nor the ABA seemed to focus on American students going abroad to receive their degree. Instead, the jingoistic fear was that foreign students would go to foreign schools and then come to America. Why don’t we want to open a door for our own students to enjoy a legal education while immersed in a different culture?
What’s more, for American law students, a good number of foreign law schools should have the advantage over the newbie American ones, given that foreign law schools often have well-established pedigrees and strong institutional support. Contrast that with the lower-tier American institutions that struggle to get by. Wouldn’t we rather have new lawyers coming out of UCL Law or McGill Law than University of North Texas at Dallas School of Law? Can’t we all concede that there are several Australian schools that could instantly produce some of the best international lawyers in the States? As a bonus, accrediting foreign law schools might result in more lawyers for a very particular under-served community: immigrants.
Some worry that allowing foreign entry into the ABA could result in a general decline in the quality of legal education. Such a concern could be easily addressed by requiring the ABA to impose the same strict standards for accreditation on foreign schools as it does on domestic ones. If no foreign school passed muster, so be it.
In sum, why aren’t we giving this a closer look? What is the ABA afraid of? A cheaper, more interesting learning experience shouldn’t be limited to the wandering undergrad. It’s time for law students to get their shot, too.
-Michael
There is a slight difficulty with proposing accreditation of foreign law schools in that they don’t actually, you know, teach U.S. law. Well, except for this one. Although I agree that, as disconnected as U.S. legal education is from U.S. legal practice, a legal degree from most common law jurisdictions would do just about as well in preparing lawyers for the U.S. market as our domestic schools do.
There’s a second problem, though. “Law school” in most common law jurisdictions (but I guess not Canada?) is actually an undergrad program. I know law is a seven year program in Australia — I think they offer a separate “JD” program too, but the whole set up is different from ours, and it’d be hard to translate.
As you hinted, law school has become less and less about the actual “teaching of law” and more and more about “teaching one how to think like a lawyer.” A common law education would prepare students to sit for the bar (and studying for the bar is when they’re going to learn the “specifics,” anyway).
Your second point is well-taken, but I think the ABA had some answers for that when they considered this themselves. An LLB was considered equivalent in the seven-year instances like Australia, while an LLM or some other advanced degree might be required in other instances. The ABA could address this lack of perfect parallelism by making sure that foreign schools offer the basics during the accreditation process, just as they do with domestic ones.