I am thrilled to announce that, beginning in fall 2015, the ELLM program will feature a new addition to our electives an exciting new course called Transnational Legal Practice. Offered in an all-online format in our fall online semester, this course will further expand curricular flexibility as well as provide a practical immersion in an area of great relevance to many practitioners engaged in cross-border transactions. The course is designed and taught by Professor Dennis Campbell, Director of the Center for International Legal Studies in Salzburg, Austria (one of our ELLM partner institutions, along with Lazarski University in Poland and ELTE Law School in Hungary), in tandem with his son, Christian Campbell. Dennis is well-known to our students who have attended the Budapest sessions and to many others due to his international prominence as a legal educator of the highest caliber. He is also a lecturer at BU Law and the newest addition to the teaching roster of the ELLM. Christian is also a highly-experienced international law expert who serves as Permanent Secretary of the International Business Law Consortium in Salzburg and who for the past seventeen years has served as Assistant Director of CILS.

It is also my pleasure at this time to welcome Dennis as a guest blogger to share his thoughts on the course. In his words:

One might ask why this course is called Transnational Legal Practice rather than International Legal Practice. The choice of terms is intentional, albeit perhaps arbitrary.Traditionally, the term international has referred to legal relationships among nation states. As the worlds economy became more globalized, a process that traces to the end of World War II, so also did the work of lawyers who followed clients across borders, who welcomed foreign clients to their home offices, who increasingly interacted with practitioners from other jurisdictions, and who challenged the usual notion of how foreign lawyers were to be regulated. Is the American who flies to Paris to meet with clients practicing law in France? Is the Massachusetts lawyer who provides legal services in Massachusetts for Dutch clients an international lawyer? Is the Budapest office of an American law firm, populated only by Hungarian lawyers, really an American law office? These questions suggest that an umbrella broader than that provided by International Legal Practice is required.

The common element in transnational legal practice is cross-border interaction. Someone or some transaction has left the home jurisdiction to provide or receive legal services in a foreign jurisdiction and perhaps multiple foreign jurisdictions. Transnational law has a variety of meanings, and some scholars have suggested that it is a new discipline of law, standing in equality with the traditional disciplines of international law and comparative law. It has been defined as a body of law whether national, international or mixed that applies to persons, business, and governments acting or having influence across national borders.In Transnational Legal Practice, we will not be much concerned with theory. The focus will be on the practical elements of the lawyer doing business abroad, and our anchors will be the cross-border nature of the practice and the regulatory elements that affect it.

I am sure that many of you will agree that this course is a worthwhile addition to our already-robust curriculum. The syllabus as well as a course description can be found on our website in the curriculum section. Thank you, Dennis, for taking the time to introduce your course to us (and for developing and teaching it, bien sûr)its great to have you and Christian join the ELLM faculty!

All best,

Ian