Globalisation and Education : Reconfigurations in Location, Scale, Form and Content

The paper is a detailed comparison on how neoliberalism affects legal education worldwide. Using the country reports from Vol. 1 of Lawyers in 21st-Century Societies, it examines how legal education has been recalibrated in terms of location, scale, form and content, focusing on specific signifiers of globalisation. Because legal education is still mainly embedded in national settings, the paper starts by discussing its relocation to law firms and how it has been globalised by new, transnational legal educational institutions. It then examines the scale of legal education. One of the key signifiers of globalisation is the massive expansion of legal education and particularly private provision. Next, the it discusses a related issue: the massification and diversification of legal education. While this development has facilitated ‘outsiders’ usurpationary projects, challenging the profession’s closure practices, various elite groups have managed to reproduce their positions. Finally, it discusses the changing form and content of legal education, focusing on the curriculum and noting how these developments are found throughout the world – for instance, the emergence of legal clinics, one of the fastest growing pedagogies, in many different countries