Intro:
Whether the history and variants of a given subject are required study or not varies by subject, but also by location/culture: for example, in chemistry people study several atomic models and generally the history behind them, whereas math often gets treated as if it spawned whole-cloth.
In Spain and from what I gather in most if not all Spanish-speaking countries, knowledge of the origins of our legal system is required (most of our old colonies have legal systems inherited from ours, so they have the same mixed origin); since that already involves knowledge of different types of legal systems, this gets rounded up. I’m not talking about International Law, but about the concepts and structures behind “common law”, “foral law”, “civil law”, systems where there is no evident structural distinction between criminal and civil law vs others where there is, whatever.
Question:
Which countries make this required knowledge for their lawyers, either as required subjects or as part of required subjects?
It’s not a course requirement in Canada, but it is inevitable that Canadian law students will be exposed to cases and principles from other legal systems, because we have inherited our law from both the common law system in England, and the civil law system in France. As well, we have been influenced by the US system, in the area of constitutionalism. I would describe it as applied comparative law, though, rather than courses in other legal systems.
I once had a discussion on this point with some law students in the US, where I expressed surprise that they didn’t study cases from other countries, to help gain an idea of law as an international discipline rather than just the US legal system. They in turn expressed skepticism that I had been exposed to cases from very many other countries, so on the spot I began to list countries from which I had read at least one case during law school. The list went something line this:
England
Scotland
Ireland
France
Cyprus
Australia
New Zealand
Pakistan
Sri Lanka
South Africa
United States - SCOTUS
United States - lower federal courts
United States - New York State courts
International court of Justice
International Labour Organization decisions
They conceded that I had had a broader exposure to law as a discipline than they had.
In a sense, all of the EU’s national legal systems do that, since law school curricula nowadays require knowledge of EU law, which is - as the European Court of Justice never tires to emphasise - an autonomous legal system with its own sources of law and interpretation rules distinct from national law. The “general pricniples of law common to the Member States” are an acknowledged source of law, but they are mostly used to provide a theoretical foundation for general concepts such as due process or right to be heard; the precise content of these principles is genuinely European and not directly borrowed from, or identical to, any national legal system. There are, in fact, areas where the corresponding tenets of European and any particular national law differ substantively.
In England and Wales, Legal Education requires you to pass a module on EU Law. In addition, the old English Legal System is now known as Common Law Reasoning and Institution in many programmes, as it now covers the basic idea of the Common Law structure from a multitude of countries, we did the US Constitution in some detail (and US Federal Courts).
In Pakistan, the various provinces differ, but you need to complete a module on the English Legal structure and the US Constitution in both Punjab and (IIRC) Sindh.
Besides this, in practice, certain area and also individuall cases/transactions might require you to gain at least a working knowledge of foreign law… people who do Commercial and shipping law will usually know quite a bit about English and NY Law for instance, as these are quite popular venues for choice of law/forum. I ended knowing quite a bit about NY Banking and Commercial law at onetime, due to work I was doing.
Certain areas of law (such as Telecommunications) are heavily based upon International treaties, agreements and standards, and a lawyer will need to know about that.
I’m surprised that they had no cases from other countries, I know I had a few from England, Canada, and Australia, but I’m not surprised at the lack of cases from non-common law countries.
(a little off topic, but related: )
It’s interesting to ask why US lawyers don’t learn foreign legal systems…
But are there any other countries like the US–where within the country there are 50 separate legal systems, which are almost “foreign” to each other?
Are there any other countries where even a highly qualified lawyer with 40 years experience is licensed to practice only in one or two states, and is forbidden from working in the rest of his own country.?
That sort of issue would arise in most federations, I would expect.
For instance, Canada has thirteen different jurisdictions. There is inter-provincial mobility for lawyers to work occasionally in other provinces, but if a lawyer is working regularly in two or more provinces, they have to join the bar in each one.
We have greater uniformity in our laws in Canada than in the US, due to our Supreme Court’s general appellate power, but I certainly would not want to appear regularly on matters of provincial law in another province, without doing a lot of advance research.
In the US system, it is important to separate first-year courses from second- and third-year courses. Lot of US lawyers study foreign laws in the latter two years, because they take electives that involve foreign law. Lots of my classmates spent part of their law school time studying in a foreign jurisdiction, for example. The first year courses are the ones standardized across the country and don’t focus much on foreign law, but even then most students read UK and Canada cases, if nothing else.
It’s virtually impossible to make it through a US law school without reading at least a dozen English cases. Shelley’s Case in property law, R v. Dudley & Stephens in criminal law, Hadley v. Baxendale in contracts, and so on.
However, I can’t think of a single foreign non-English case that was covered in a required course. We might have touched for a minute or two on cases in other [nation-]states in constitutional law. International law was “required” in the sense that you had to take it or one of two other courses, and obviously we covered a number of foreign cases in that class (though not many; most of the course was about application of international and foreign laws in US courts.)
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But are there any other countries like the US–where within the country there are 50 separate legal systems, which are almost “foreign” to each other?
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Except for Louisiana, most US jurisdictions are really quite similar. By and large, contract law is the same in almost every US jurisdiction (and differs very little from English contract law, for that matter.) Civil procedure, too.
The deadlines to file X pleading or raise Y defense might differ, but most lawyers would have to look those up in their own jurisdictions anyway.
. True that, which matched the comments I got back from the students I was speaking to.
That also matched their experiences.
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Except for Louisiana, most US jurisdictions are really quite similar. By and large, contract law is the same in almost every US jurisdiction (and differs very little from English contract law, for that matter.)
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It’s a bit different in Canada. Outside of Quebec, the common law of property, contracts and torts is not just similar; it’s identical, because the SCC is a general court of appeal. (Those areas of law can be modified by provincial statute law, of course, creating some differences across the country.)
In the US, there’s a political theory amongst right-wing republicans that any court that cites foreign law is an unamerican liberal traitor and part of a left-wing conspiracy to waive national sovereignty and establish a new world order one world government with a “world court”. So lawyers don’t typically cite cases that the court won’t want to cite itself, much less rely on.
I know the OP said they weren’t talking about international law, but when I read the OP that was my first thought. I’d guess that out side of the US, knowing the law in neighboring countries is probably much more common. Many people in the US will probably never leave US soil, much less commit a crime outside of it or have business dealings outside of it. But the US is huge*. I have to assume that in other countries (countries closer to the size of our states), crossing borders is more common and lawyers, at least ones working near borders, probably have to learn the laws of other countries. Or, at least it would help if they do. Also, the US only borders two countries (and they’re pretty far apart, whereas many other countries border 3 or 4 or more.
*I was listening to a radio show the other day and someone mentioned something about going from LA to NY and the host (NdGT) had to remind the international listeners that going that far involved traveling nearly three thousand miles without leaving the country. Randomly picked Nigeria is (according to wiki) about twice the size of California. I think people in the US often times forget not only how large the US is, but also how culturally isolated we are because of it.
I’m not sure that follows from the OP. I think (but I really don’t know) it would be possible to learn American law without ever knowing foreign law.
OTOH, as someone who had planned to major in physics at one point, I don’t think it’s possible to fully grasp physics without a good grasp of calculus. You might be able to get away with auditing the classes or attending physics lectures to learn some stuff. Understanding dampened harmonic motion or how the Doppler effects works in principal is one thing, but without a very strong math background, you’re never going to fully understand it and you certainly won’t be able to get a job in the field (that would require you to work directly with it).
I don’t know of any that’s “licensed locally”, but I can tell you that my experience with Spanish lawyers and related trades is that most of them go all kinds of colors when they hear the word foral, and whenever I get subcontracted by a Spanish firm that’s not from one of the two foral regions I need to hit their lawyers figuratively but repeatedly with their own Derecho Administrativo classbooks. I recently needed to hire a lawyer to consult on an inheritance issue involving the laws of Catalonia and Navarre; six Catalonia-based lawyers refused the case on grounds of “I/our firm doesn’t do foral”, the only Navarrese I contacted took it.
And yes, I was specifically not talking about international law (which is specific laws) but about the existence and internal structures of different types of legal systems. Studying international law does give some insight into this, but it’s indirect. The answers along the lines of “we studied these types of international law” still count, though.
Gary T, one of the reasons we study the history of atomic models is that it’s directly linked to their applicability. Someone came up with one but alas, it didn’t work in such and this and that case, so someone else came with a better fit but it still didn’t work for everything so… all those models are still valid, so long as you can track when. Knowing their history means knowing where they work and where they fail, which is a basic part of being able to do chemistry. Can you do chemistry without knowing that? To a point: I’ve met organic chemists who had never studied any but organic, and while they could cook molecules, their yields were thousands of times lower than mine - because they had no idea of what conditions to use, that’s physical chemistry. I met someone who had studied the atomic models without their history and she was completely lost when it came to figuring out when to use each one, she couldn’t understand why the rest of us would switch between models constantly. It’s like someone who’s studied verbs but not nouns.
True enough. I am only licensed to practice in Alberta, Canada (and my license also allows me argue before the Supreme Court of Canada, in Ottawa, Ontario). But I cannot practice as normal in other provinces.
There is limited reciprocity between provincial law societies (i.e. bar associations) to allow for a few days’ representation of a client in a province where the lawyer is not licensed. Once, there was a chance I would have to represent a client in British Columbia, and a check with that province’s law society told me that I could represent that client in that province for a maximum of 20 days. But anything more, and I would have to become a member of the BC bar.
At least in the EU, that is not common. A German lawyer would be trained and licensed to practice in Germany. Even if that lawyer lives in a town right at the border to France, they would not be qualified in French law; a resident of that region who has an issue involving French law would simply cross the border and consult a French lawyer there. Of course it’s possible that the German lawyer has some understanding of French law, but they would hardly ever be formally qualified in it and practice it, in the sense of providing legal advice or even litigating in French law.
There are, indeed, lawyers with multiple qualifications. But these are usually the ones who work in big commercial law firms, not those running their own law firm in a border region. What is more, even those people will typically not actually practice the other law in question; they got the additional qualification to increase their chances on the employment market, but they would hardly ever truly practice in two jurisdictions at the same time. It would be way too risky in terms of liability for malpractice, since they would have to remain constantly up to date to developments in two jurisdictions.
As far as international law (both public and private) is concerned, the situation is not really comparable, since there is no formal qualification in “international law”.
Plus Federal Court, Tax Court, federal boards and tribunals. I once appeared before the National Energy Board in Calgary; didn’t need a temporary ticket.
I once had a temporary call for an appeal in the Alberta Court of Appeal, before the days of automatic reciprocity for individual matters. Had to be formally introduced to the court (Justice Côté) and swear the oath, on an undertaking that I would resign from the Law Society of Alberta as soon as the matter was concluded. Nowadays, it’s as Spoons mentions: for individual matters, there’s reciprocity and my Saskatchewan ticket is good in other provinces.