Article by Nicholas Kasirer
This Article examines whether the mixed legal system presents a model for law teaching. The author observes that in most mixed legal systems, legal education does not focus attention on the encounter between legal traditions that is inherent in the idea of the law's inherent mixedness. He argues that legal education might better be imagined as including a cross-cultural dialogue in law rather than as training for experts in a particular place or set of places. By imagining the mixed legal system more as an experience in encounter than a jurisdiction, legal education might be reoriented around ideals of nomadic and dialogic jurisprudence in place of jurisdictionally based concerns. The author invokes the concept of métissage advanced by scholars in other disciplines as a basis for arguing that legal education should ally itself with the encounter between different legal traditions as an organizing theme in law teaching. Instead of seeking a double or even multiple-tradition expertise, law teachers and their students would aspire to no allegiance at all before law's nomadic identifies and traditions.
About the Author
Nicholas Kasirer. Dean, Faculty of Law, McGill University; James McGill Professor of Law, McGill University, 1989-Present. Director, Quebec Research Centre of Private and Comparative Law, 1996-2003. Former law clerk to Justice Jean Beetz of the Supreme Court of Canada. Graduate of the University of Toronto, McGill University, and the Université de Paris I.
Citation
78 Tul. L. Rev. 481 (2003)