No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2013
In the academic year 1939–40, it would have taken a hardy prophet to forecast that the field of international legal studies was destined soon to become a major growing point in American legal education. Yet, for that reason and because it was the last year before World War II registered its impact on law school faculties, students, and even curricula, it provides a useful baseline from which to measure the developments that have since been taking place in this field among American law schools.
The law school work offered in 1939–40 which could be fitted within the category of international legal studies was represented by courses and seminars in International Law, Comparative (and Roman) Law, and Conflict of Laws. A brief survey of these offerings will lay bare the grounds for pessimism as to the prospects for progress at that time.
1 The term “international legal studies” has not been generally employed in legal education. At the Harvard Law School we have resorted to it in response to our need for a term sufficiently comprehensive to include work in these three subjects and in some new areas for law study into which we have been venturing. Our conception, moreover, is broad enough to cover the study, say, of American corporation law by a Swedish legal scholar or of Swedish corporation law by an American scholar. Inevitably either scholar's efforts involve the process of comparison and some progress toward international understanding. In other words, legal studies may be rendered “international” by reason of the nationality of the persons engaging in them.
2 The Harvard Law School, one of the exceptions, offered only Judge Hudson's seminar in International Law Problems in addition to his main course.
3 The volume of useful work being done across the lines of legal systems differing in major degree was unimpressive, not only in the United States but abroad as well. In Europe the amount of work devoted to Comparative Law was far greater than in the United States, but much of the work done there involved the comparison of the laws of various Continental nations. This actually called for little more exacting comparative analysis than has long been a commonplace in law study in American law schools, where the existence of 49 American jurisdictions, plus those of the common law members of the British Commonwealth, made it a matter of course to use a comparative method within the confines of the Anglo-American tradition.
4 My data are based on Teachers' Directory—Association of American Law Schools 1952–1953 (West Pub. Co.), reinforced by a survey of a not quite complete or wholly up-to-date collection of law school catalogs. The margin of error would not be wide.
5 In 1949 Professor R. B. Schlesinger of Cornell edited the first casebook on Comparative Law to be published. Professor A. T. von Mehren of Harvard has case materials in preliminary form, to be published next year. A number of other teachers have developed mimeographed materials for the use of their classes.
6 Professor John N. Hazard of Columbia has been the pioneer in this development. He has prepared mimeographed “Cases and Readings on Soviet Law” (1950). ProfessorBerman, Harold J. of Harvard uses, in conjunction with his Justice in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1950)Google Scholar, a novel case collection published this year, Berman, and Konstantinovsky, , Recollected Cases of a Soviet Lawyer (Cambridge, Mass., 1953)Google Scholar.
7 The Journal, edited by Professor Hessel E. Yntema of the University of Michigan Law School, is published at that university. Sponsor members make financial contributions to its operation. The sponsoring law schools are at the following universities: California, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Georgetown, Harvard, Indiana, Louisiana State, Miami, Michigan, New York, Southern Methodist, and Yale. Among the sustaining members are the Universities of Puerto Rico and Utah and Loyola University at New Orleans.
8 A recent announcement of the Institute of Comparative Law established at New York University under the direction of Professor Bernard Schwartz indicates that this program is being extended to students from other areas.
9 For an application, in general terms, of Professor McDougal's methods to another part of the international field, see McDougal, , “The Comparative Study of Law for Policy Purposes: Value Clarification as an Instrument of Democratic World Order,” American Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. 1, p. 24 (1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 The significance of this datum may be diminished by information which I lack concerning the number of law schools giving their students credit for International Law courses offered by political science departments.
11 “… a great deal of the law under which all of us live and work in these United States is written, not by Congress and the state legislatures or by the courts and the administrative agencies, but by American lawyers, sitting in their offices, striving to carry out the lawful wishes of their clients.” Cavers, , “Legal Education and Lawyer-Made Law,” West Virginia Law Review, Vol. 54, pp. 177–85, at pp. 177–78 (06, 1952)Google Scholar.
12 The danger that constricting conceptions of law may lead to a distorted picture of its role in world affairs ia vigorously exposed by Professor McDougal of Yale in his comment on the views of Kennan and Morgenthau who deprecate the “legalistic” attitude of Americans toward international affairs. McDougal, Myres S., “Law and Power,” American Journal of International Law, Vol. 46, pp. 102–14, at p. 103 (01, 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 A few days after writing this sentence, I discussed an intricate legal problem with the general counsel of a body which has operations on a global basis. At the end of our talk, he remarked: “Of course, I always include clauses in our contracts that should make the question irrelevant.” For the important interests involved, these clauses will represent the law—lawyer-made law. Cf. note 11.
14 As was noted above, Conflict of Laws had always been taken by nearly all third year students, and no change was made with respect to it, except, for greater program flexibility, to supplement the full-year course with one-semester courses in both the first and second semesters.
15 His place is being filled this year by Visiting Professor Clive Parry of Cambridge University.
16 Professors Harold J. Berman; Kingman Brewster, Jr.; Louis B. Sohn; and Stanley S. Surrey. They are being aided this year by a Teaching Fellow, Mr. Richard N. Gardner.
17 This seminar had to be suspended for this year when Professor Bowie was granted leave to head the Policy Planning Staff of the Department of State and to serve as its representative on the Planning Board of the National Security Council.
18 This seminar could easily have been listed under “Problems of World Order.” However, it provides a good medium to foster understanding among lawyers with differing backgrounds who are concerned with the common problems of federation. The fact that a seminar may reasonably fall under two of our headings we regard as a virtue of the seminar. We set no store by our scheme of classification.
19 The Harvard Law School allows its students up to six hours credit toward the LL.B. degree for courses taken outside the Law School. The Dean's permission is required but this is ordinarily granted for work in areas adjacent to the law curriculum.
20 This hesitation probably is ill-founded. A capacity for self-education on the job has enabled many law graduates to do distinguished work on international assignments for which they had had no special preparation either in law school or in practice. But ordinarily it takes the exigency of war or some professional emergency to induce the venture. And even the successful must overcome handicaps.
21 Mention should also be made of an arrangement that is still in its infancy by which students may combine work as candidates for the M.A. degree in International Affairs or in Regional Studies with the study of law. A student may satisfy the requirements of the second year of work for the M.A. by pursuing a suitable program of law study in the international field, using fully the privilege of taking some work outside the Law School. He may take his basic first year's work for the M.A. immediately before either the first year of law study or the third, the latter alternative being perhaps the more fruitful. Since no student under this plan has yet reached the critical third year of law study, its merits remain untested in academic experience.
22 Disregarding the flood of men and women who do not go beyond the undergraduate course in law and who enter business or government administration in non-legal positions.
23 Professors Berman, Sohn, and von Mehren.
24 Convinced that American law students could best be introduced to the Civil Law systems by an American teacher with a background of American law study, the faculty persuaded Arthur von Mehren, soon after his graduation, to go abroad with the rank of Assistant Professor for two years of law study. He stayed three, spending one year in Zurich, one in Berlin working on German law for OMGUS, and one in Paris. He has since been appointed Professor of Law.
25 The development of international legal studies in the United States in recent years owes much to the reinforcement of our faculties by European law teachers who came here to escape Nazi aggression. A number of them have achieved distinction in American law and have become masters of American teaching methods. But such a source of scholarly and teaching talent, we can only hope, will not be a continuing one.
26 A helpful device to this end was tested for the first time in June, 1953 when a group of five teachers from the Harvard Law School went to Austria to teach 55 students in a brief session on American law and legal institutions offered by the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies. The students came from most of the countries of Western Europe and included judges, law teachers, governmental officials, and practicing lawyers and students, ranging in age from 21 to 50. Though the session lasted for only four weeks, the association of teachers and students was very close, and the former felt that they gained from it at least as much as they gave. We hope to repeat the session next year, drawing on different teachers. Probably not all of them will be from Harvard.
Comments
No Comments have been published for this article.