The fall 2018 issue of The National Jurist includes an article on the ways American J.D. students benefit from sharing classes with foreign attorneys in LL.M. programs. The foreign lawyers in their classes, study groups, mock trial teams, and law student organizations are exposing U.S. law students to a variety of legal cultures, which helps prepare them to practice in an increasingly global economy.
Vanessa Suarez (J.D. expected 2019) plans to become an international arbitrator. It would be expected, then, that the third-year student at The University of Texas School of Law would have chosen a law school in a more cosmopolitan city than Austin, which gets props for being hip but is not exactly international.
But Suarez has no regrets. The University of Texas offers an LL.M. program for foreign attorneys designed to prepare them for global practice. The foreign attorneys are fully integrated into the J.D. Program, so they sit side by side with Suarez and other American students.
“We have students from all over the world, really, and they all had different perspectives they bring in class that I would not have thought of,” Suarez said. “With everything becoming global, there’s no such thing as domestic law anymore.”
The University of Texas is one of 74 law schools that offer programs in U.S. law for foreign attorneys and one of 156 that admit foreign attorneys to graduate law programs. Those numbers have grown exponentially in the past decade as law has become more international.
Lawyers from all over the world come to The University of Texas School of Law (Texas Law) to expand the breadth and depth of their legal knowledge and invest in a valuable postgraduate degree – an internationally recognized Master of Laws. The LL.M. Program is diverse, selective, and small. LL.M. students from foreign countries and the U.S. are fully integrated into the academic life of the Law School, learning side by side with J.D. students. The LL.M. class is global in reach, with 37 students from 14 different countries in the Class of 2019. In fact, The University of Texas at Austin is home to over 7,500 international students and scholars, and the rich diversity on our campus is essential to our success as a learning community.
The Law School offers a single LL.M. degree with six different concentrations. The six concentrations provide students the opportunity to complete specified courses and obtain a certificate of specialization in:
- Global Energy, International Arbitration & Environmental Law (Top 10 LL.M. Programs for Energy Law according to LLM Guide)
- Human Rights & Comparative Constitutional Law
- Cybersecurity Law
- Latin American & International Law
- Business Law
- U.S. Law for Foreign Lawyers
The 2018-2019 LL.M. Programs includes distinguished lawyers from all over the world, including:
- Association for International Petroleum Negotiators Scholar from Brazil
- CONACYT-FUNED-SENER Hydrocarbons Scholar from Mexico
- CONACYT-SENER Scholar from Mexico
- CONACYT-SENER Hydrocarbons Scholar from Mexico
- Fulbright Scholar from Bulgaria
- Fulbright Scholar from Fiji
- Institute for Transnational Law Foreign Judge Fellow from Germany
- Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation Scholar from Brazil
- Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation Scholar from Nigeria
Angela Morris, J.D. students find that sharing classes with foreign attorneys in LL.M. programs is a valuable part of their legal education, 28 The National Jurist 25 (2018).