CRAIG SCOTT, Osgoode Hall Law School
Email: cscott@osgoode.yorku.ca

The purpose of this article is to identify three understandings of transnational law, all of which have a certain integrity depending on one’s premises about the nature and institutional operation of law. The approach adopted is not to make an argument for the single best reading of the concept of transnational law but instead to outline three candidate conceptions of that notion. For purposes of the article, these conceptions are not assumed necessarily to be competing conceptions. Rather, their potential compatibility is left open for future consideration. In this sense, 'transnational law' is presented in the article as a kind of fuzzy or suggestive 'proto-concept.' After a scene-setting discussion of various caveats concerning the notion of “transnational� within 'transnational law,' the three conceptions - transnationalized legal traditionalism, transnationalized legal decisionism, and transnational socio-legal pluralism - are briefly discussed in turn. Alongside the conceptual discussion, the article uses the implications for legal education as one way of expressing the significance of each conception. The article ends with the contention that 'transnational law' is an idea that pushes the boundaries of the legal imagination in such a way that, at the very least, legal theory and legal education based entirely on ‘domestic’ (state) and ‘international’ (interstate) constructs of law must be open to developing in ways that might take all concerned out of current conceptual comfort zones.

SIMON CHESTERMAN, New York University - School of Law, Singapore Programme, National University of Singapore, Faculty of Law
Email: chesterman@nyu.edu

This article examines the evolution of legal education as it has moved through international, transnational, and now global paradigms. It explores these paradigms by reference to practice, pedagogy, and research. Internationalization saw the world as an archipelago of jurisdictions, with a small number of lawyers involved in mediating disputes between jurisdictions or determining which jurisdiction applied; transnationalization saw the world as a patchwork, with greater need for familiarity across jurisdictions and hence a growth in exchanges and collaborations; globalization is now seeing the world as a web in more ways than one, with lawyers needing to be comfortable in multiple jurisdictions.

ARMAND DE MESTRAL, Faculty of Law, McGill University
Email: armand.de.mestral@mcgill.ca
HELGE DEDEK, McGill University - Faculty of Law
Email: helge.dedek@mcgill.ca

One of the major challenges legal education faces nowadays is that jurisdictional boundaries are losing significance in an internationalized, globalized and post-regulatory environment. This calls into question the very notion of “law� itself, at least as traditionally understood as a system of posited norms within a given jurisdiction, and the classic model of legal education based on such an understanding of law. While North American legal education has a longstanding tradition of self-reflection, the situation in Europe is different: there is little incentive for legal scholars to devote a considerable amount of time to a serious scholarly treatment of the issue of legal education. Whereas the challenge of internationalization, particularly in its emanation of “Europeanization,� has literally become omnipresent in legal discourse, legal education is still dominated by a traditionalist view of its primary goal: an almost exclusive focus on training lawyers (or judges) for the practice within the boundaries of a national jurisdiction. As a contribution to the debate on the challenges posed to the teaching of law we would like to offer the following brief analysis of the efforts made at the Faculty of Law of McGill University, situated in Québec, Canada to develop a new approach to the teaching of law. Ten years ago, in 1998, the Faculty undertook the effort to offer an integrated comparative three year curriculum, known as the McGill Programme, that teaches even first year introductory courses, such as Contracts and Torts, from a comparative perspective. The ultimate aspiration of this programme, however, is to transcend the fixation on the study of law as the study of “legal systems� - hence the label “trans-systemic� legal education.

JAAKKO HUSA, University of Joensuu
Email: jaakko.husa@joensuu.fi

The argument in this paper draws inspiration from the pedagogical theory of so-called constructivism. An effective law curriculum is one which can stimulate students to learn legal thinking. The constructivist approach suggests that the learner is more actively involved in a joint enterprise with the law teacher of constructing new legally relevant, and perhaps competing, meanings. Comparative law and/or foreign law and even approximate knowledge of different foreign approaches to similar types of questions may be regarded as a valuable tool for the construction of a primary pluralistic legal mind.