In December I traveled a few hours, well perhaps a little more than a few hours, to a lovely city in Lower Saxony, Germany—Osnabruck, to teach U.S. corporate law to German law students at Universitat Osnabruck. The students were eager to learn about the U.S. common law legal system, and agreed to enhance their German civil code legal education by adding an English common law component including studying certain aspects of British and U.S. laws. The program is part of Universat Osnabruck’s extensive commercial law program that exposes students to laws of jurisdiction throughout the European Union and North America. The program also provides fairly impressive transnational externship placements with public and private institutions as a requisite part of the law curriculum. As a result, the laws students receive doctrinal theory as well as real world practical experience. Universat Osnabruck has been operating on this model for approximately the last ten years. In addition, the law school offers an extensive comparative law summer program with partners in Europe, Canada, and the American Institute. Viva German law schools!
The commercial law program is really quite well run by Prof. Dr. Martin Schmidt-Kessel, a German attorney, who has spent some time in New York working at Rogers & Wells in the heyday of the technology stock explosion just prior to the industry’s implosion. Lecturer Matt LeMieux, an American attorney, former ACLU litigator, who has been living in Germany for the past five years all for the love of German culture, is an integral component in securing American law professors to make the journey to Osnabruck. They are an interesting legal team and offer a wealth of American ideology and legal know-how to aspiring German law students. The German law students are an industrious lot. After all, it takes a special type of law student to not only study a foreign jurisdiction’s laws but to do it in a foreign language. The class is taught you guessed it—in English. The students’ primary language is German. I would have loved to have taught the class in French, but some well meanings folks may have thought it rather odd that an American law professor was teaching U.S. corporate law in French. Oh, well c’est la vie.
It is from this perspective that I was surprised to read about the student protest turn riot in London over the increase in student tuition and fees. Nothing in the German law students’ reaction indicated that anything was amiss. There were no student riots in Germany. No outrage expressed in the local German news coverage. I didn’t even hear German student raise their voices in anger, in solidarity with their British cohorts. When I raised the issue in class, I was hoping for a robust discussion on American capitalism, market driven decision-making, and the violation of the public trust. After all isn’t Germany the land of Karl Marx and Martin Luther? Viva the sinful proletariat, and the dutifully religious common working man and woman! The students simply stared at me. Finally, a brave student shared that German students “do not pay very much for their legal education and the costs in America for education is way too much. Then the American students have a BIG debt. How do American student repay their loans when they cannot find a job,” he asked? Interesting. I had crossed the Atlantic to teach U.S. corporate law to German students, and here I was being lectured by German students about the market-driven U.S. legal education system, which ladens recent graduates with a huge debt burden that probably take years to repay, if at all.
After class, I inquired as to how much do German students pay for their legal education. “Approximately, 600 Euros, “I was told. “For books,” I confirmed. “No for one year’s tuition.” “What! At the current currency exchange rate that is less than $1,000 American dollars,” I stammered. As I continued discussing the issue with a number of Germans, an intriguing philosophy began to develop, in essence--the German Government believes that Germans should be well educated in order for Germany to remain a competitive commercial and manufacturing powerhouse on the international scene. As such, the German Government heavily subsidizes the education system –at the undergraduate and graduate levels to encourage Germans to attend university. It seems to have worked pretty well when we compare Germany’s literacy rate, employment rate, college-graduate rate, commercial preeminence, et cetera. The Germans are not only competitive; they are arguably in certain sectors doing remarkably better than us market-driven Americans. Perhaps it is time that we Americans rethink our market-driven education system, and learn a few lessons from our German colleagues across the Atlantic. Lydie Nadia Cabrera Pierre-Louis
