legal education

Introduction

      preparation for the practice of law. Instruction in law has been offered in universities since medieval times, but, since the advent of university-based law schools in the 18th and 19th centuries, legal education has faced the challenge of reconciling its aim of teaching law as one of the academic disciplines with its goal of preparing persons to become members of a profession. Most law schools have tried to find a middle path between being a mere trade school and being a citadel of pure theory. Unfortunately, the criticism is sometimes made that these efforts result in a type of education that is not practical enough to be genuinely useful in resolving day-to-day legal problems but yet not as rigorously theoretical as a truly academic discipline ought to be.

History

      The ancient Romans (Roman law) had schools of rhetoric that provided training useful to someone planning a career as an advocate, but there was no systematic study of the law as such. During the 3rd century BC, Tiberius Coruncanius, the first plebeian pontifex maximus (chief of the priestly officials), gave public legal instruction, and a class of jurisprudentes (nonpriestly legal consultants) emerged. A student, in addition to reading the few law books that were available, might attach himself to a particular jurisprudens and learn the law by attending consultations and by discussing points with his master. Over the ensuing centuries a body of legal literature developed, and some jurisprudentes established themselves as regular law teachers.

      In the medieval universities of Europe, including England, it was possible to study canon law and Roman law but not the local or customary legal system, since the latter was understood as parochial and so unworthy of university treatment. In most European countries the study of national laws at universities began in the 18th century, though the study of Swedish law at Uppsala dates from the early 17th century.

      On the continent of Europe the transition to the study of national law was facilitated by the fact that modern legal systems grew mostly from Roman law. In England, on the other hand, the national law, known as the common law, was indigenous. In medieval times education in the common law was provided for legal practitioners by the Inns of Court through reading and practical exercises. These methods fell into decline in the late 16th century, mainly because students came to rely on printed books, and after the middle of the 17th century there was virtually no organized education in English law until the introduction of apprenticeship for solicitors in 1729. The famous jurist Sir William Blackstone (Blackstone, Sir William) lectured on English law at Oxford in the 1750s, but university teaching of the common law did not develop significantly until the 19th century. In England, as on the Continent and throughout most of the rest of the world (though not in the United States), university-based legal education became an undergraduate program and remained so until quite recently. Since the late 20th and early 21st century, a number of nations have adopted the so-called U.S. model of legal education, providing university-based instruction in law as a profession rather than only as an academic discipline.

      In the early years of the United States, persons hoping to enter the law sought apprenticeships in the offices of leading lawyers, a method of training that provided an acceptable avenue to the bar well into the 20th century. The Litchfield Law School, founded in Litchfield, Conn., in 1784 by Tapping Reeve (Reeve, Tapping), was the first institution of its kind in the United States. Such independent schools later gave way to university-based law schools, the first of which was established at Harvard University in 1817. By the late 19th century, Harvard had put in place a number of practices that eventually came to define American legal education, including the use of the “case method” of instruction (see below Teaching (legal education)), the requirement that students complete three years of training, and the use of a full-time faculty of scholars, rather than a part-time faculty of practicing lawyers as had previously been the case. As the number of law schools grew, so too did the proportion of the bar who were law school graduates. By the early 21st century the United States had more than 200 accredited law schools and the world's largest bar, numbering more than one million members.

      Law has long been a subject of serious study in some non-Western countries, as evidenced by the centrality of legal exegesis in the Islamic tradition and the inclusion of law on examinations for the civil service in China during the Song dynasty (960–1279). Modern university-based legal education, however, is generally regarded as a foreign institution, having been introduced by European colonial powers in the 19th century.

Lionel Astor Sheridan William P. Alford

The aims of legal education

      Legal education generally has a number of theoretical and practical aims, not all of which are pursued simultaneously. The emphasis placed on various objectives differs from period to period, place to place, and even teacher to teacher. One aim is to make the student familiar with legal concepts and institutions and with characteristic modes of legal reasoning. Students also become acquainted with the processes of making law, settling disputes, and regulating the legal profession, and they must study the structure of government and the organization of courts of law, including the system of appeals and other adjudicating bodies.

      Another aim of legal education is the understanding of law in its social, economic, political, and scientific contexts. Prior to the late 20th century, Anglo-American legal education was less interdisciplinary than that of continental Europe. With the development of a more or less scientific approach to social studies since the late 20th century, however, this has been changing. Some American law schools appoint economists, historians, political scientists, or sociologists to their staffs, while most permit their students to take courses outside the law school as part of their work toward a degree. Continental legal education tends to be highly interdisciplinary, if more abstract and doctrinal than its American counterpart, with nonlegal subjects compulsory for students taking their first degree in law.

      Traditionally, legal education has included the study of legal history, which was once regarded as an essential part of any educated lawyer's training. Although economics is increasingly popular as a tool for understanding law, much legal history is nonetheless taught in the context of the general law curriculum. Since the corpus of the law is a constantly evolving collection of rules and principles, many teachers consider it necessary to trace the development of the branch of law they are discussing. In civil-law (civil law) countries, where most parts of the law are codified, it is not generally thought necessary to cover topics that antedate the codes themselves. On the other hand, in countries that have a common-law (law code) system, knowledge of the law has traditionally depended to a great extent on the study of the court decisions and statutes out of which common law evolved.

      Even in jurisdictions that require four or five years of law study (as in Japan and India), the graduating law student is not expected to have studied the whole body of substantive law but is, however, typically expected to be familiar with the general principles of the main branches of law. To this end, certain subjects are regarded as basic: constitutional law, governing the major organs of state; the law of contract, governing obligations entered into by agreement; the law of tort (or delict in civil-law systems), governing compensation for personal injury and damage to property, income, or reputation; the law of real (or immovable) property (see property law), governing transactions with land; criminal law, governing punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation, and prevention of offenses against the public order; and corporation (or company) law, governing the leading form that economic actors take in modern society. The materials studied are largely the same everywhere: codes (where these exist), reports of court decisions, legislation, government and other public reports, institutional books (in civil-law countries), textbooks, and articles in learned periodicals. The aim is not so much that the students should remember “the law” as that they should understand basic concepts and methods and become sufficiently familiar with a law library to carry out the necessary research on any legal problems that may come their way.

Study and practice

      To some extent, legal education is out of harmony with legal practice, for in real life a case is not presented as neatly by a client to his lawyer as it is in a textbook. The case usually begins as a statement, often jumbled, of facts and problems that cut across pedagogical categories. A story of a road accident, for example, may involve the lawyer in considering questions of the civil responsibility for the cause of the accident; of contract (in relation to insurance); of criminal law (in relation to a traffic offense); and of other branches of law as well. It is therefore important, while making divisions of law for convenience of study and examination, to guard students against the danger of thinking in compartments.

      Lawyers also must contend in practice with branches of law in which they have received no formal education. More importantly, new social issues requiring legal attention and new legal structures come into existence during every lawyer's lifetime in all societies, particularly in those undergoing rapid economic or political development. A good law school produces a graduate who is not constricted by pedagogy but is trained to adapt to—and perhaps even to help bring about—changes in the law.

      The curriculum of the law school also must allow for the great diversity of careers followed by those who have been trained in the law. In many countries large numbers of persons with legal training seek careers outside the legal profession, commonly in civil service, commerce and industry, and education. In many countries it is common for law schools to prescribe a certain number of compulsory subjects, which are regarded as essential to any law student's education, and to allow the student to select other subjects as well, stipulating only the number of courses to be studied.

      The extent to which legal education aims to teach practice and procedure varies from place to place. Attention is always given to the methods of ascertaining the law from the books but not always to the ways of using this knowledge in various roles, such as legal adviser or judge. Discussion of these matters tends to be more widespread in countries where the main qualification to practice law is a university degree—as in the United States—than it is in countries where law-school graduates undergo further professional training—as in England, some parts of continental Europe, Japan, and Korea. Since the 1970s, clinical programs, which provide students with real or simulated experience in law practice, have become a staple part of the American law-school curriculum. On the Continent such training would typically be part of a postgraduate apprenticeship program—as in Switzerland, where graduates spend one or two years in practical work under the supervision of a judge or a lawyer.

      Courses on the rules and principles of court procedure are usually compulsory in university law schools. In England, however, few universities teach these subjects, leaving them to the bar and to solicitor's examinations, though the law of evidence (governing what facts may be proved in court and how) is usually an optional subject; some knowledge of civil and criminal procedure may, of course, be picked up incidentally during the study of substantive law.

Teaching and scholarship

Teaching

      Methods of legal education are constantly changing, but the requirement of a university degree has become more or less uniform, coupled in many countries with the need to pass a qualifying examination organized by the profession. Apprenticeship, once a usual way of entering the profession in common-law countries, has everywhere been increasingly displaced by university education, to which it has now become a supplement.

      University law schools tend to differ along national lines in their methods of teaching. In the United States, following the work of Christopher Columbus Langdell (Langdell, Christopher Columbus) at Harvard in the latter half of the 19th century, the prevailing technique came to be the case method, in which the student reads reported cases and other materials collected in a casebook, and the class answers questions about them instead of listening to a lecture by the teacher. The case method has been adopted at some institutions in England and other common-law countries but has yet to find broad adherence elsewhere. Even in the United States most law schools now use seminars and lectures as well. The case method has the advantage of emphasizing the characteristic feature of the common law—the evolution of principles from decisions in actual cases—and thus of focusing the student's attention on the processes of analogy and distinction. It has the disadvantages of, first, being relatively time-consuming in relation to the amount of knowledge of legal principle that can be imparted and, second, concentrating on a source of law that has become just one of many in modern statutory and regulatory legal systems. The traditional teaching techniques in English universities have been lectures and tutorials (or seminars).

      In continental European countries the backbone of legal education is the formal lecture. Class sizes are typically very large compared with those in the United States and England. Attendance is frequently voluntary, and those who stay away are usually able to secure the text of what they have missed. Seminars are given too, particularly for specialized subjects. Similar methods are used in other countries with large numbers of law students. In Russia, as in western Europe, the lecture method supplemented by smaller discussion groups is typical.

      Teaching methods are not unrelated to the nature of the legal system. The methodology of Continental legal education has grown out of and perpetuates a legal tradition heavily influenced by scholars, while the methods in England and the United States have emerged from and contribute to the maintenance of the tradition of judge-made law. Methods were influenced also by the fact that in England legal education was from early times in the hands of the bar, while on the Continent from the 12th century on it was the province of the universities. The fact that in common-law systems principles of law are largely derived by a process of inductive reasoning from many decisions of higher courts lay behind the development of the case method. In continental Europe the fact that law is found mainly in systematic legislation is one of the chief reasons for the lecture method, in which the subject can be approached through its philosophical background. A desire to expound systematically a body of principles is met better by formal lectures and textbooks than by class discussion. This formal approach is reinforced in countries where published reports of local court decisions are scanty.

Scholarship

      Legal scholarship has also undergone considerable change. With one foot in the academy and one in the world of affairs, legal scholars in many parts of the world do not fit entirely into either domain. In the United States and some other common-law jurisdictions, legal academics historically were not expected to produce the volume of scholarly writing characteristic of their brethren in the arts and sciences. In some civil-law jurisdictions, most notably Germany, scholars occupied a singular position of prominence in articulating the law. In many other jurisdictions, however, they were required to support themselves primarily through practice and thus were deprived of the opportunity to conduct extensive and fully independent research.

      Since the late 20th century there has been a growing trend toward a more scholarly approach. In the United States, for example, the standards by which legal faculty are judged for tenure have moved closer to those of purely academic fields, while in many other countries law schools have made concerted efforts to underwrite faculty research. Nonetheless, the gap between law and the rest of the academy remains, exemplified in the United States by the fact that law is one of a very small number of disciplines in which most major journals are edited by students.

Examinations and qualifications

      The process of selecting members of the legal profession begins in the universities and law schools and continues afterward in the form of professional entrance requirements.

School examinations

      In the common-law countries, students are generally required to pass an examination in each subject. Four or five subjects are studied simultaneously during the academic term, and students must take examinations in all of them at the end of the term or year. In many civil-law states, students are required to pass a certain number of examinations in various subject areas in order to qualify for a degree.

      In some continental European countries, more-comprehensive examinations are the rule. In Germany the course work for the university law degree normally takes about six years, with a single comprehensive examination at the end (the First State Examination). Students are admitted to this examination if they produce certificates of satisfactory work in each subject, in a jurisprudence seminar, and in a course on economics and finance. The Netherlands (Netherlands, The) has an intermediate system: the course for a first degree in law lasts four to five years, with an examination at the end of the second year and another at the end of the fifth. Russia combines the system of examinations in each course with a comprehensive examination that may come after four, five, or six years of study.

      The method of subject-by-subject examination is less taxing on the memory than the system of comprehensive examination. It may well enable students to do more detailed work on the problems of each subject. It has the disadvantage of encouraging them to think in terms of separate subjects, whereas the comprehensive examination leads them to consider legal problems in all their aspects. Being aware of the dangers of compartmentalized thinking, some law schools in the common-law world have introduced into their curricula “general” or “bridge” subjects, such as “common law,” in place of separate courses in contract and tort. They may also (or alternatively) require students to write papers about issues related to several of the subjects studied.

      No formal test is wholly satisfactory as a method of screening potential lawyers. The type used most widely, in which students write answers to questions in an examination hall, has been criticized for placing too much emphasis on memory. This criticism is met to some extent in many universities by allowing candidates to consult books and reference materials during the examination, thus bringing the test a little closer to what a lawyer will do when confronted with a real problem. Another objection is that testing creates a situation of stress, in which candidates do not necessarily demonstrate how they have benefited from legal education, and also a situation that does not require the student to demonstrate all the skills required of a lawyer. In particular, the examination does not test the capacity for patient research or the capacity for oral argument (though it should be noted that, in some jurisdictions, end-of-term examinations are oral).

      Some universities in the United States, England, and the Commonwealth countries require one or more long essays or a short thesis or research paper as part of the work for a first degree in law (as opposed to the more substantial dissertation, or thesis, for a postgraduate law degree). This is commonly written during the final year with no restriction on the resources employed. A thesis in the last year of study is required in some civil-law countries. Credit is also sometimes given for articles or notes published by students in law reviews. Such student publishing is more common in the United States than elsewhere, partly because most U.S. law schools have their own legal journals and partly because American law students are nearly always college graduates. Such student work also enhances prospects of employment, particularly if the student becomes an editor of the journal.

      As noted, oral examinations are the rule in some countries, such as Italy, though in the United States they are rare. French universities typically use both written and oral examinations. Some English and overseas Commonwealth universities hold oral examinations to confirm or resolve doubtful results on written papers or as a prerequisite to the award of first class honours. In Italy, where a law student must present a thesis after passing other examinations, the thesis must be orally defended before examiners. The German law student, after passing a written examination, undergoes an oral one. And in Japan, professional qualification at the Legal Training and Research Institute has involved oral examinations.

Qualifications for practice

Common-law (common law) countries

      In England and Wales a practicing lawyer must be either a barrister (an advocate whose work is predominantly directed to the courtroom) or a solicitor (a general legal adviser who deals with all kinds of legal business out of court and who may act as an advocate in some of the lower courts). The former are organized in four Inns of Court (Lincoln's Inn, Inner Temple, Middle Temple, Gray's Inn) under the discipline of the Senate of the Inns of Court; the latter are under the jurisdiction of the Law Society. It is not necessary to hold a university degree to qualify for the profession of law, but such a degree (most often in law) is usual. To become a barrister, a candidate must pass a two-part examination in legal subjects, but university graduates may obtain partial or total exemption from the first part, depending on their degrees. A barrister's preparation also includes practical courses and a period of pupilage administered under the authority of the Senate of the Inns of Court. A barrister may not practice at all until he has undergone six months of pupilage in chambers and may not practice independently until he has been a pupil for a year. Pupilage causes some difficulty, partly because of the cost but mainly because of the increasing shortage of places in chambers. To qualify as a solicitor, the normal course involves serving as an articled clerk (apprentice) for two years and passing law examinations in two parts. In Scotland and Ireland (both the republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland) there are similar requirements, though the arrangements differ in detail.

      In the United States, admission to the bar qualifies one for all types of legal work. The only formal requirements are passing a state bar examination after graduating from law school; in a few states the law degree alone is sufficient.

      In both England and the United States, as in many other common-law countries, becoming a judge or magistrate is a promotion (by appointment or election) from the ranks of the bar, and there is no special training for the exercise of judicial functions. But in some other common-law countries, especially in Africa and Asia, a newly qualified lawyer may enter the government legal service and find himself appointed in a short time to a junior magistracy. Even in these countries there is generally no special training for the job of adjudicating.

Civil-law (civil law) countries

      In continental European (Europe) countries the qualifications to practice law typically depend on which of the various branches of the profession the university law graduate wishes to enter. Some countries place more emphasis on apprenticeship and others on examination. In France, for example, a legal practitioner may be an advocate, an avoué, a notary, or a judge. Each receives a different training, but all normally have gone through third- and fourth-year law degree courses. The advocate (roughly corresponding to the English barrister) must pass a bar examination and then serve as a probationary lawyer for three years, during which he takes further course work as well as acquiring practical experience. The avoué (something of a cross between a junior barrister and a senior solicitor) serves a period of articled clerkship and undergoes a professional examination by practicing lawyers. The notary (who does the noncontentious work performed in England by a solicitor) need not be a university graduate and can be a product of a professional school. His period of training lasts two years in a notary's office. He also takes a professional examination and, if successful, must wait for a vacancy, since there is a limited number of notarial offices established by law.

      In Germany the graduate in law who seeks a legal career must embark upon a period of practical training as a Referendar. This is a uniform program involving two years of practical work in the courts, in the office of a lawyer in private practice, in the office of a public prosecutor, in the civil service, and sometimes in the legal department of a commercial concern. Upon its completion the graduate must pass a second state examination (Assessorexamen).

      A somewhat similar procedure is followed in Japan. Law (Japanese law) graduates who seek careers as judges, prosecutors, or lawyers in private practice must pass the National Law Examination for entrance to the Legal Training and Research Institute. Like his German counterpart, the Referendar, the Japanese student at the institute is paid by the state. The bulk of the work consists of practical exercises and discussions, lectures on legal topics, and visits to institutions of concern to lawyers (such as prisons). The training is uniform, leads to a single examination, and qualifies the graduate for any branch of legal practice.

      In some countries, such as France and Spain, there are special schools for training judges. In others, such as Germany and the Nordic countries, judicial training is acquired in the post-law-school period of practical internship. In Germany, for example, a law graduate may be appointed to a lower court after completing the Referendarzeit and passing the second state examination. After serving a probationary period, he becomes eligible for an appointment for life. In France the first step to becoming a judge is to pass an annual competitive examination for which students prepare by taking a special program in their last year of law studies. Successful candidates then must undergo extensive training consisting of a period of formal study at the National School of the Judiciary in Bordeaux, followed by a series of short practical internships in settings such as police departments, law offices, prisons, and the Ministry of Justice in Paris. This training culminates in a judicial apprenticeship, during which the future judge participates on a daily basis in all the activities of a variety of courts. Upon completion of their training period, the students are ranked on the basis of their grades and the evaluations of supervisors and are then assigned to their first positions in the judicial system. Since the administrative law courts in France are not part of the judiciary but rather of the administration, most judges for these courts are drawn not from lawyers trained in the National School of the Judiciary but from civil servants trained in the National School of Administration.

Levels of study

      Law degrees are undergraduate degrees in most countries. The student embarks upon the study of law at a university at about the age of 18. In France, universities offer a two-year course that may be taken by anyone who has completed secondary education. High marks in this entitle the candidate to enroll for the licence-en-droit, which is given at the end of the third year of study. Successful completion of a fourth year leads to a maîtrise-en-droit, which for all practical purposes has become the basic French law degree.

      In the United States, by contrast, most law schools require the entrant to be a university graduate. Consequently, most U.S. law students are in their early 20s, though there is also a considerable number of older students who have first done other graduate study or who have held jobs after receiving their undergraduate degree. In other countries there may be more than a single path leading to legal study. In India, for example, both three- and five-year courses are offered; the former is available to persons with an undergraduate degree in another field while the latter effectively substitutes for an undergraduate degree by providing instruction in English, political science, economics, sociology, and history as well as the law itself. In Japan and China, among other countries, a growing number of universities offer practically focused “American style” law degrees to persons whose first degree is in a subject other than law.

      University law schools in some countries accept all candidates with a certain level of prelegal education. One drawback of this open admissions system is a substantial failure rate in examinations. In countries where candidates are screened before admission to law school, there is less attrition. In England, for example, each university imposes a quota on entry to its law school and selects among candidates on the basis, usually, of academic performance. In the United States, candidates are selected on the basis of academic performance and the results of a test designed to demonstrate aptitude for the study of law. In both the United States and England, entry requirements vary according to the prestige of the law school.

      Most countries also provide for higher degrees in law. In common-law (common law) countries there is usually a series of such degrees, including a master of laws and a doctorate or senior doctorate. In civil-law (civil law) countries it is normal to go straight from a first degree to a doctorate. Master's degrees are, as a rule, based on advanced examination after courses of instruction, though sometimes they are awarded for research or for a combination of examination and dissertation. Doctorates are awarded for theses expounding the results of original research and senior doctorates for published contributions to scholarship in the subject. In many countries there are also specialized postgraduate diplomas or certificates in particular subjects.

Trends in legal education

      Modern legal education has been expanding throughout much of the world since the end of World War II. In the United States, for example, the number of law students enrolled in accredited schools tripled between 1961 and 1980; after a brief period of decline in the late 1980s, the number increased steadily through the early 21st century. In England, where few significant academic law departments existed before the war, there are now more than 80 such institutions. Much the same phenomenon has been evident in many parts of continental Europe.

      However dramatic the growth of legal education in the aforementioned areas, it pales in comparison with that underway throughout Asia, Latin America, and Africa. China's burgeoning law schools, which were shut down during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76, were home to some 160,000 students at the end of the 20th century, while both Japan and India produced scores of thousands of law graduates annually in the early 21st century. In the same period, Latin American (Latin America, history of) legal education also was growing, albeit at a slightly slower pace, with large universities such as the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the University of Buenos Aires regularly adding to the ranks of the legal profession in the region. And Africa's law schools, many of which were established in the period of decolonization after World War II to help nurture new national legal systems, are yielding a steady stream of graduates.

      The growth of legal education has been spurred by several factors, including the increasing number of women entering the workforce and pursuing higher education since the 1960s (women now represent approximately half of all law students in the United States); the various movements for civil and human rights worldwide; the need of many transitional regimes for new constitutional and legal orders; and, on the economic front, the fragmentation of production between different companies or different national legal jurisdictions.

      In addition to their impact on the size of legal education, these factors have also influenced its content. Some of the courses that have been added to the curricula of leading law schools worldwide concern new theoretical or doctrinal issues, such as those related to gender, race, state structure, and the shifting composition of the legal professoriate. Other courses are far more practical, reflecting the greater complexity of business transactions and the growing role of lawyers in counseling about them. Still others are a response to the profound internationalization of the law: American law schools have embraced foreign legal studies in an unprecedented fashion, and law schools elsewhere have increasingly adopted the more transactionally focused legal training they associate with the United States.

Lionel Astor Sheridan Mary Ann Glendon William P. Alford

Additional Reading

The classic mainstream work on the history of legal education in the United States is Robert Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (1983, reissued 2001). A more skeptical view is presented in Jerold S. Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (1976, reissued 1978). The Socratic method of instruction is the topic of Philip Areeda, “The Socratic Method,” Harvard Law Review 109:911 (1990). A critique of Socratic teaching is offered by Lani Guinier, Michelle Fine, and Jane Balin, Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law School, and Institutional Change (1997). The role of American legal education in shaping the profession is considered in Anthony T. Kronman, The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession (1993, reissued 1995); and Mary Ann Glendon, A Nation Under Lawyers: How the Crisis in the Legal Profession Is Transforming American Society (1994, reissued 1996). The Journal of Legal Education, published quarterly by the Association of American Law Schools, offers a range of articles about contemporary legal education.Articles and other materials dealing with the norms in other countries—including Brazil, Chile, China, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, The Netherlands, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Kingdom—appear in Association of American Law Schools, Conference of International Legal Educators: The La Pietra Conference (2000); Louise Trubek and Jeremy Cooper (eds.), Educating for Justice Around the World: Legal Education, Legal Practice and the Community (1999); Jens Drolshammer and Michael Pfeifer (eds.), The Internationalization of the Practice of Law (2001); Erhard Blankenburg, “Patterns of Legal Culture: The Netherlands Compared to Neighboring Germany,” American Society of Comparative Law (Winter 1998); and Patrick R. Hugg, “Comparative Models for Legal Education in the United States: Improved Admissions Standards and Professional Training Centers,” Valparaiso University Law Review (Fall 1995). A valuable introduction to the civil-law world and its legal education is John Henry Merryman, The Loneliness of the Comparative Lawyer and Other Essays in Foreign and Comparative Law (1999). James M. West, Education of the Legal Profession in Korea (1991), is a particularly interesting short national study.William P. Alford

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