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Bridging students, research, and practice in today's global age

As globalization breaks down the barriers of international businesses, economies, and cultures, the IU Maurer School of Law's Center on the Global Legal Profession is forging relationships that defy borders, while becoming a home base for the development of the international skills needed by the lawyers of tomorrow.

Learn more about the Center:

• Approach and foci
• Faculty
• Recent accomplishments

A three-part approach

The Center's work focuses on the role of lawyers in a global society, the business of lawyering, and the organizational context housing legal practice. This work benefits its three constituent groups -- students, scholars, and practitioners -- in several important ways.

Students

The Center exposes Indiana Law students to globalization by offering internships in dynamic international markets. Every year, Indiana Law's Milton Stewart Fellows participate in summer internships with law firms, corporations, and non-governmental organizations in India, Brazil, and South Korea. The Law School collaborates with significant global universities, including India's Jindal Global Law School, Peking University School of Transnational Law, and São Paulo's Fundação Getulio Vargas, on initiatives that enrich the student experience.

Students also benefit from the Center's empirical research. Indiana Law uses data from the Center to inform an innovative first-year course on the legal profession. Building on this data, legal ethics, and the law of lawyering, the course immerses students in a variety of practice settings and educates them on the competencies they must develop to succeed in their professional lives.

In the legal profession course, students wrestle with realistic problems that force them to apply the rules of professional responsibility and to comprehend how economics, workplace pressures, and organizational incentives affect lawyers. Working in teams, students present or enact their solutions and are critiqued by the instructors and their fellow students. Twice during the semester, students engage in formal reviews of the performance of their teams, their team mates, and themselves. The goal is to prepare students for the ethical and professional challenges they will soon face.

Research

The Center's research hones -- but also embodies -- one of Indiana Law's traditional strengths: an empirical and law-and-society based approach for studying how law can and should effect social change. This is reflected in the Center's faculty's research on human rights, corporate social responsibility, global legal education, income and job satisfaction in the legal profession, access to justice, the political values of lawyers, and the role law firms play in this era of globalization.

Although the approach to these topics is firmly from a scholarly perspective, the Center's faculty also aspires to develop ways that their research can have actual, real-life impact through interactions with lawyers, judges, policy-officials, non-governmental organizations, and claimants. This objective is accomplished in a variety of ways: through rigorous on-the-ground field work, dissemination of findings in the popular media, bringing in enriching speakers from outside the university, and hosting of conferences and symposia. The Center collaborates with the school's Center for Law, Society, and Culture on many of these research initiatives and activities.

Practitioners

The Center assists current attorneys with navigating the complexities of international legal issues and equips students with the tools they need to be successful lawyers in a globally based environment.

For example, consider a law firm that represents a company with branches scattered throughout the United States, China, India, and Brazil. While the firm’s American-based attorneys are well versed in how the legal process unfolds domestically, their knowledge in the international legal systems may lag behind. That knowledge gap results in inefficiencies that cost businesses time and money. The Center's research provides firms with data to help close that gap.

Indiana Law's Center on the Global Legal Profession is the first organization to look at the global legal industry as a whole from a big-picture perspective. Recognizing the trends from the profession over the last several decades and outlining models of where it is likely heading, the center is molding the way the attorneys of the present and future practice their trade.

The Center's faculty

The Center's faculty brings together a diverse array of scholars with expertise on the legal profession throughout the world. They are:

• Kenneth Dau-Schmidt, an economist and labor law expert who has conducted empirical studies of lawyers' careers and studies of the provision of pro bono legal work.
• William Henderson, the Center's director, whose work focuses on the empirical analysis of the legal profession and legal education.
• Jayanth Krishnan, director of the Center's India initiative, an expert on the Indian legal profession and responsiveness of the Indian court system to claimant grievances.
• Ethan Michelson, a sociologist and expert on China, the first scholar to conduct rigorous empirical research on the Chinese legal profession.
• Christiana Ochoa, whose research concentrates in two interconnected areas, primarily in Latin America: the role of individuals in law formation and the inextricable links between global economic activity and human rights.
• Carole Silver, an expert on the international legal profession and the competencies required to succeed in that arena. She is also the director of the Law School Survey of Student Engagement, which tracks and analyzes the student experience at nearly 200 law schools.

The Center's recent accomplishments

The Center's work is best exemplified by its recent accomplishments. Here are a few:

• Professor Jay Krishnan's study of the lower judiciary in India under a grant from the Ford Foundation.
• Professor Ken Dau-Schmidt's study of the impact of gender and childcare on legal careers under a grant funded by the Law School Admissions Council.
• Professor Ethan Michelson led a workshop as part of the American Bar Foundation’s “After the JD” initiative.
• "Country Talks" is a new lunchtime series at Indiana Law developed by Silver and featuring glimpses into the legal systems of other countries, presented by the school’s LLM and SJD students.
• Professor Christiana Ochoa's work on law and development, including a course offered for the first time in the fall of 2012 and a forthcoming documentary on the impact of development on a small village in Colombia.
• Professor Silver's research on the career paths of international LLM students, and a forthcoming article on a similar topic in Korea.
• Professor Michelson's research in China as a Fulbright Scholar
• Scholarship funding for summer internships in India, Brazil, and South Korea.
• A project at Harvard Law School on globalization and lawyers in emerging economies, for which Krishnan is an affiliate researcher.
• In partnership with IU's Institute for Advanced Studies, the hosting of a visit from Ernest Abotsi, a Ghanaian legal scholar.
• Hosting of Michael Newbill, the U.S. National Security Advisor on South Asia.
• A continuing project building a data set on the career experiences of Indiana Law alumni led by Professor Dau-Schmidt.

Find a complete listing of the Center's activities at its website.