Last week, the UVA School of Law followed up on some of its faculty who went abroad this summer to teach mostly non-American law students at law schools located around the world. The faculty profiled in the article included criminal law scholar Josh Bowers, vice dean for the law school and food and drug law expert M. Elizabeth Magill, contracts scholar Kevin A. Kordana and torts and insurance law expert Kenneth S. Abraham. Additionally, international business expert Paul Stephan also spent the summer teaching abroad.
The UVA Law professors on the whole reported that their experiences teaching at schools such as Peking University’s School of Transnational Law in China, Melbourne Law School in Australia and University of Munster in Germany helped them view the U.S. legal system and its laws from a new perspective. Vice Dean M. Elizabeth Magill summarized the impact of teaching U.S. food and drug law to students at Melbourne like this: “Matters that are of great concern [in the U.S.] — for instance, the delegation of policymaking authority to administrative agencies — are not concerns elsewhere…This forces me to think about why that is. I have found the experience of teaching abroad invigorating because it gives me new perspectives on fundamental aspects of the U.S. legal system.”
In addition to finding new ways to look at their subject, some of the UVA professors marveled at how similar the experience of teaching U.S. law to international students was to leading a class at UVA Law. Professor Kordana, in particular, was surprised that the Chinese students he taught at Peking University were just as smart and “really eager, really engaged” as the students at UVA, and were familiar with the style of legal instruction used by U.S. law schools – no doubt due to the School of Transnational Law’s American-style approach to law teaching.
It will be interesting to see how the students in Charlottesville will benefit from their professors’ international experiences when the fall term begins for 2Ls and 3Ls on Wednesday August 25.
