Introduction

Throughout the 20th century, elite US law schools have been presented as sites of power, admiration, influence and envy. Robert Stevens, in the opening of his seminal 1983 work Law School, suggested that foreign lawyers looked wistfully at elite US law schools for two central reasons. First, they have held such commanding positions within American universities and the profession. Second, their law graduates went on to occupy privileged and influential posts that contributed to changing political and social ordering. To Stevens’ foreign observers, mimicking or transplanting American models must have seemed the most promising way to create new bands of legal elites, highly educated lawyers with reformist orientations, in their own countries. Adding to the impression of American dominance, Gail Hupper and others have explained how some US law professors took to the task of spreading the model with missionary-like zeal.