Failed Dreams of Transformative Legal Education: The (Non)-Americanization of East Asian Lawyers
Abstract:
During the 1990s, Japan, Korea, and China all undertook significant reforms of their systems of legal education. These reforms occurred during the high tide of global optimism about legal reform’s ability to catalyze positive social change, and the rise of what might be called an era of “transformative legal education reform.” Impacted by the late 20th-century prestige of American lawyers, each country’s reforms drew on interpretations of American postgraduate legal education and the potential of reforms based on its example to improve economic or political development.
Neither democratic vitality nor economic dynamism marks the evaluation of these reforms today. Instead, these reforms have produced contested diagnoses, leaving domestic debates solely focused on more localized issues of lawyer employment and law schools’ financial sustainability. These experiences match broader acknowledgment of the limited concrete impact of the American legal education model abroad—once a reflexive assumption among many scholars and reform proponents. Ironically, postgraduate “JD” programs have recently spread across the world, but without any accompanying expectations of legal or social transformation— primarily seen by many universities as lucrative income streams.
The comparative lessons of these experiences are synchronous with recent critical studies of global legal change, as well as the contentious history of American postgraduate legal education itself— often absent from the model’s international promotion. These modern East Asian experiences provide powerful examples of the potential liabilities of both advancing legal education reform as a solution to systemic social problems and using foreign legal examples without a sufficiently critical lens. The consonance of these comparative and historical lessons urges ongoing debates concerning legal education in any country to adopt a position of cosmopolitan humility and acknowledge the limitations of legal education reform within the larger political economy of lawyering.
Recommended Citation: Jedidiah J. Kroncke, Failed Dreams of Transformative Legal Education: The (Non)-Americanization of East Asian Lawyers, 48 Fordham Int'l L.J. 53 (2024).