The University of Michigan Law School has a long tradition of involvement with the education of foreign lawyers about U.S. law through its LL.M program, but now it will collaborate in the legal education of foreign law students through an agreement with Jindal Global Law School (JGLS) of O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU). The school's announcement in November said that the memorandum of understanding establishes a Joint Centre for Global Corporate and Financial Law & Policy, and provides the framework for the two schools to develop collaborative initiatives on faculty and student exchange programs, teaching and research initiatives, conferences and publications and continuing legal education programs. The Centre’s directors will be Michigan’s Prof. Vikramaditya Khanna and JGLS Professors Vivek Pande, Charles Maddox, and Ajay Goyal. JGLS has forged agreements with two other U.S. law schools in the last two months -- Indiana and Yale.
Michigan's efforts were noted in the National Law Journal story, Globalization, law schools get serious, which summarized the evolution of international focus by U.S. law schools:
Many law schools recognize that the profession has gone global and that young lawyers need more than just a solid foundation of U.S. law. They are starting to move beyond theoretical discussions of globalization to focus on the real-world skills students need to succeed in that environment. That transition is still in the early stages.
Nearly 130 of the 200 American Bar Association-approved law schools already offer ABA-sanctioned programs in foreign countries during breaks in the regular school year, and now the organization is weighing whether to offer accreditation to overseas law schools. At least two relatively new foreign law schools — Jindal Global Law School near Delhi, India, and Peking University School of Transnational Law — have announced plans to seek accreditation should the ABA move forward with that initiative. In the meantime, schools are launching their own programs intended to add international opportunities.
