Transnational law is defined as all law which regulates actions or events that transcend national frontiers. The term denotes a shift in legal thought and practice from a world where a small number of lawyers are involved in mediating disputes between jurisdictions or determining which jurisdiction applies to a world increasingly viewed as a patchwork of jurisdictions where greater familiarity across boundaries is both possible and required. Today, the increasing global integration of countries and peoples and the dismantling of barriers to the flow of goods, services, capital, and knowledge is shifting this view of a patchwork of jurisdictions to a more structurally and inextricably linked web where lawyers must be able to operate in multiple jurisdictions, often simultaneously, and understand non-traditional regulatory regimes transcending traditional jurisdictional analysis.

This course aims to prepare students for this fast-changing global context by teaching competence to analyze complex legal problems through study and training in transnational legal cultures and lawyerly practice. The course has four objectives: (1) comparative, in learning about other legal systems and in particular the major principles and institutions of the Civil Law system which will provide students with critical purchase on the core assumptions underlying the American Common Law system; (2) practical, in responding to the demands of modern transnational legal practice; (3) problem-solving, in learning how to identify and think through cross-border and transnational legal problems; and (4) in relation to legal authority and governance, understanding new forms of legal authority and the normative challenges of different legal orders.