For nearly a year, Hiram Chodosh, Dean of the S.J. Quinney School of Law, has been working with scholars across the nation, law school professors and Aspen Publishers, Inc. to create a book series that will reform international legal education.
The first book in the “Law Across Borders” series, Plea Bargaining Across Borders: Criminal Procedure, will be published this spring. Two more books will follow in 2010. The plan is to have 12 to 15 titles covering all the major law school courses, said Carol McGeehan, publisher for Aspen’s Legal Education group.
The problem is that international legal education is not integrated into core domestic legal education. Instead, law schools have just added more courses to cover international legal issues, Chodosh said.
“No one has taken away anything, we’ve just added. So what’s a student to do?” Chodosh said. “It becomes very inefficient, it becomes very overwhelming and it runs the risk of students who are interested in international (law) taking international level courses without getting the domestic expertise.”
The idea behind the series is to create a concise book centered around one problem that will provide teaching notes for professors who might not have a background in international law, McGeehan said.
“This approach seeks to leave students with a framework for asking fundamental questions about any domestic issue,” Chodosh said.
The topics the first books will cover include climate change and abortion regulation across borders. Other topics being considered are cyberlaw, the death penalty and hate speech, said Lynn Churchill, the senior acquisitions editor who is in charge of signing new projects to the series.
Three U law professors are submitting proposals for different topics that could go in the series.
“Erika George is working on an antidiscrimination book…Chibli Mallat is working on a proposal for a contract book…and Amos Guiora is working on a proposal for where terrorists should be tried,” Chodosh said.
The plan for the series is to have approximately four books that come out every year, Chodosh said.
“It will go as far as it succeeds,” he said. “So if it falls flat, we won’t build any more books.”