How to globalize
How should Yale Law School become a global law school?
It seems to me that the goals should be to (1) create groups of people around the world that are not Yale graduates but understand the goals of a Yale law school education and feel affiliated to Yale — and add to the Yale experience in ways we can't predict, (2) make Yale graduates comfortable that they (a) know how to find something out about a foreign law system (even if they never practice there) and (b) understand the contingent and evolutionary nature of legal systems, and (3) form strong alliances with other institutions around the world, so that students and professors and programs can flow across the borders. One law school, many doors. To do this, you need money, open borders, and lots of feedback mechanisms.
Here's a ten point proposal:
1. Use the alumni. Have them help the school find more connections outside the US.
2. Use those connections outside the US to funnel substantial cohorts of foreign fellows to the school. Rely on the recommendations of alumni and foreign institutions, coupled with essays by applicants, and try to devolve responsibility for the applicants (quality control, some financial assistance) to alumni associations around the world.
3. Have each group of foreign fellows be in residence at the school for two weeks. Have them form part of an existing first-year small group for one of those two weeks (going to all the first year classes). Have them work with professors in seminar settings for the second week. Have them bond and commit to working on public service projects (across geographic boundaries, together) over the ensuing three years.
4. Have each cohort return to the school for a refresher one-week meeting once each of the next two years. Call them Koh Fellows. Get the alumni to fund the Koh Fellow project.
5. Don't have more than four cohorts come to the school each year — two initial meetings (one fall, one spring) of two cohorts, and two refresher meetings (one fall, one spring) of the existing cohorts. Cohorts should be welcome additions to the law school community, not intrusions on the law school's small world.
6. Have the Koh Fellows report on the progress of their projects to the world. Online.
7. Inspire sister institutions to bring different groups of Koh Fellows together, in different places around the world.
8. Use the other institutions at Yale. Work with them on cross-disciplinary global projects. Focus on one institution a year. Set goals for the global projects that are objective.
9. Form alliances with other global law schools. Work on curriculum reform with those other law schools. Share faculty with those other schools. Experiment with online course materials — and make them open to the world.
10. Change the first-year curriculum to include a comparative law course of some kind. Create global fellowships for existing students, offering to pay back their loans if they commit to working in international affairs/human rights for 10% of their career. Have these students report back over the course of their careers about what they've done.
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Mostly Yalies should go to Yale Beach Week ; get locked up and chill with other law students from around the world; learn the differences between US lockups and Mexican lockups then be cool with the world system!