Transnational Legal Education

Transnational legal education is increasingly understood as important to teaching law within the context of a global political economy and global flow of goods, people, services, and legal concepts. Transnational legal education has been driven by the need for primarily elite lawyers, often working in global law firms, to serve expanding capitalist needs. This shift in legal services has accompanied the decentralization of state power and correlative privatization and deregulation of legal norms over the past forty years. However, what is often not explicitly stated by those supporting transnational legal education is that its pedagogy, and the material practices of transnational law, intrinsically involve the concept of legal pluralism. This chapter strives to place the concept of legal pluralism front and center into the conversation on transnational legal education and in so doing highlight that all legal processes (at subnational, national, and transnational levels) are relational, dynamic, and deeply imbricated in culturally contingent contexts and diverse worldviews. The lessons learnt about legal pluralism in the teaching of transnational law are thus relevant and applicable to all kinds of legal education, be it explicitly engaged with legal practices operating beyond national borders or not.