Legal Education for the Future

Around the world, legal education is undergoing marked transformation. This is perhaps most apparent in emerging markets like India, Brazil, and China where legal education has witnessed a sea change in the last 25 years. Beginning in the 1990s, India, Brazil, China, and other emerging economies began to move from “closed” economies to ones that were increasingly open to foreign investment and private enterprise.

One can identify three main reasons why business skills are increasingly critical for the 21st century lawyer: they provide a means of understanding one’s own client’s business; they offer the toolkit for running one’s own organization, whether that be a law firm or in-house legal department; and they help maintain one’s own professional marketability, particularly in an era of blurred professional boundaries.

There are signs that resistance to technology is diminishing, whether witnessed through the abundance of new legal startups or by law firms leveraging technologies that promise to lower costs and increase quality. Legal education is no different and has recently begun to respond to the market opportunities available at the intersection of law, technology, and business.

The most advanced law degrees at elite law schools in the United States are the J.S.D. (Doctor of the Science of Law) and the S.J.D. (Doctor of Juridical Science). These degrees are primarily awarded to foreign law students. Meanwhile, most U.S. law professors do not have a J.S.D. or S.J.D., but rather a J.D. and sometimes a Ph.D. from another field. Why is it that the J.S.D. and S.J.D. are offered primarily to foreigners, not Americans?