Global Practice Exercise

All faculty

Each semester will begin with an intensive, multi-day exercise in transnational and/or comparative law, built around an important and timely issue.  The exercise will provide an opportunity for the Center’s diverse students and faculty to work together on a common legal problem.  All students and faculty members will participate in this exercise.  The objectives are to give students and faculty a quick start working together, to highlight the importance and challenges of communicating across transnational legal and cultural boundaries; to draw Center participants into active roles in their own learning and academic exchange; and to introduce students to the process of tackling real-world legal problems that transcend national boundaries.  (Required).

 

Transnational Law Colloquium

Coordinated by Professors David Cole and Nina Pillard, Georgetown University Law Center

This colloquium will meet weekly for presentations by leading academics and practitioners on topics of current international, transnational, or comparative law interest.  Each meeting will involve the presentation of a paper, brief comments, and a discussion with the author/presenter among all participants.  Attendees will be the Center’s students, faculty and invited guests.  Students, who will be divided up and each assigned to attend a subset of the workshops, will be expected to write short responses to the papers in advance of the meeting.  (1 credit; Required). 

 

Core Course:  Transnational Legal Theory

[various faculty]

The objective of this required core course is to introduce students to leading theories of international, transnational, and comparative law from a variety of theoretical traditions. The core course is designed to provide students coming from a wide variety of backgrounds with a common set of intellectual frameworks and concepts to address the topics they will be studying in the Center’s program.  We will explore issues such as natural law and positivism, the nature of sovereignty, sources of law, the legitimacy of international law, pluralism, law and multiculturalism.  The expectation is that exposure of all students within the program to these ideas will facilitate exchange during the semester, and will prime students to understand and use these theories in the other substantive areas that they study.  (3 credits; required)