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

The book argues that, by contrast, the Master of Laws (LLM) and Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) programmes in the US, unlike their UK counterparts, the British LLM and the British PhD in law, do not have much to offer to Commonwealth African law schools. If anything, a number of American law schools are constructing unaccredited post-JD degree programmes, such as the LLM and SJD degrees, which Americans themselves often shun and do not even attach much value to, as a way of making easy money out of desperate foreign-trained lawyers who either want to break into the US job market or have limited knowledge and information on the US system of legal education and law practice. That said, the trend in the UK of permitting some LLB graduates to proceed directly to PhD programmes has limited attraction in Africa.

1.1 The Context of the Study

The book stands back from classroom pedagogy and avoids the polemics associated with the elaborate process of curriculum design. Neither does the book engage in pedantic issues of various syllabi of courses on university law programmes nor does it indulge in intricacies of teaching methods, such as the Socratic method of teaching law at most US law schools. What the book seeks to do, instead, is to provide, first, an international and comparative study of academic programmes at American and British law schools. Secondly, the book examines the issue of whether or not African law schools should adopt a particular Western model of academic programmes.

While the book focuses on prospects for the development of effective law degree programmes at law schools in Commonwealth Africa, it does not concern itself with similar or parallel issues in law schools of African countries that exist outside the Commonwealth.