SID Thematic Projects: Legal Infrastructures: Systems of Legal Education

A law-based order in the 20th century is inconceivable without a system of education to train and socialize lawyers.  Thus, a nation’s regard for the role of law in the social order can be inferred from the extent of its efforts to institutionalize a system of legal education.

The sources of information for evaluating systems of legal education across the world were: World’s Universities (1939), World Guide to Universities (1971, 1977), World Guide to Higher Education (1976, 1982, 1996), Universities Yearbook (from 1914), Index Generalis (1919-1954, 1982-1999), Law Schools of the World (1977), World Law Directory (1969, 1974), and World Law School Directory (1993). Each of these publications has a limited number of editions, in most cases only one or two.  Also, some had uneven geographical coverage.  While information on Western European countries, former colonies, and the North American countries was most plentiful, every country in the study has some coverage (often in multiple sources). 

Given the limitations of individual sources, the approach adopted here was to draw information from all sources. Where multiple sources existed for a given country we were able to double check the data entries.  Using multiple sources, however, required that the data be collected at the school level.  The school-level data was collected cumulatively, one source at a time.  Data entries were made, and updated, in an Excel program by an undergraduate whose work was supervised and checked by a graduate student.  Each country has a separate file and within each file every university has its own worksheet.

The type of information contained in each resource varies but with multiple resources we were able to gather information on the following:

• Year in which the university was founded;
• Existence/operation of the law school in a given year;
• Whether the law program is university-affiliated or is a free standing, proprietary entity;
• Number and type of law faculty (e.g. lecturers versus professors);
• Type of law degrees offered (undergraduate, graduate);
• Number of years required to complete each degree.  

The data collection from the above sources will not yield a complete body of information on systems of legal education across the world.  But it will generate a preliminary listing of law schools in each country with information for some years.  Other aspects of the legal infrastructures project (i.e., the legal associations subproject) will be used to check, and potentially supplement, the list of law schools derived from the review of these resources.  Also, an internet survey and a website review will be used to seek more specific information (i.e., the year in which the law program was begun) as well as to supplement missing information.

Once the data collection process has been completed, interpolations and extrapolations will be made to fill in missing data, where appropriate (i.e., existence of the program, degrees offered, etc.).  Then the school-year based data will be aggregated to generate a body of information at the country-year level.  The codebook for this project provides more precise insights into the type of data that will be available for this component of a nation’s legal infrastructure.