Comparing American and British Legal Education Systems: Lessons f ...

Chapter 1

Introduction

This book examines the extent to which Commonwealth African law schools should or could learn from experiences of American and British law schools in developing their own academic programmes. It examines degree programmes at American and British law schools with a view of determining whether Commonwealth African law schools should simply transplant models of university degrees from the US or the UK to Africa. Analogies are drawn from developments in Canada and Australia where some universities have now started to follow the US, abandoning the traditional undergraduate law degree programme, the Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree, in preference to offering a post-Bachelors degree, the US-style Juris Doctor (JD) degree.

An underlying thesis of the book is that although the UK and the US have fairly old and well-established universities, a number of LLB programmes at Commonwealth African law schools are as good as similar programmes at leading British and American law schools— that is, the LLB degree in the UK and the JD degree in the US.