International Business, Law Merchant, and Law School Curricula

Abstract

One of the questions closely related to the subject of the present Symposium, entitled "Interpretation in the University/Interpretation of the University," is whether the current university curricula reflect the tendencies and needs of today's society. As far as the law school curricula are concerned, this problem becomes prominent in a time when international business is becoming more and more important, i.e., in an age when business no longer is confined to any particular national boundary, but is open to an international trade. For a long time lawyers and law schools did not feel the need to make concessions to the new trends; they were (and some of them still are) "content to be insular in this sense." Such resistance to change inevitably leads to what has been called "provincialism of legal training," and hence, provincialism of legal thinking. Fortunately, this tendency of self-confinement seems to characterize solely the field of legal science. Indeed, in other fields such as natural and medical sciences, there is an international exchange of information (i.e., of discoveries and opinions). In fact, "[t]here is no such thing as German physics or Belgian chemistry or American medicine." All natural and medical scientists, regardless of their nationalities, contribute to a more diversified and fruitful production of knowledge in their respective fields.