Careers in International Law
a partner after leaving Harvard Law School. At that time, if anyone wanted to be involved in a practice that addressed Chinese law, it had to be in the private law sphere representing clients in Chinese investment transactions and dispute resolution matters. Thus, I made a very specific decision to enter a law firm and occupy myself with private international law; if I had been inter- ested in public international law and international institutions, I might have gone off to the State Department or United Nations, or perhaps an NGO.
How would you define the differences between private and public international law?
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I think of private international law as the study and practice of private law with respect to en- gagement between private actors over national borders and across different national legal sys- tems, even though this activity will, on occasion, implicate public law questions. Of course, much of this is focused on cross-border trade, invest- ment, and financing. Public international law in my mind concerns the relationship between states, and is also relevant to the governance and operation of the world’s post-World War II multi- lateral institutions.
How important to practicing private international law is having a linguistic or cultural background from another country?
My own view is that it is absolutely necessary, but I recognize that I am perceived of as a bit hardcore on this question. My idea is that you cannot function with respect to a given system of law unless you have very good language skills so that you can understand the design and opera- tion of laws and legal institutions (both formal and as applied), and then so you can draft, negotiate, and craft critical expressions of agreement or pro- cess in that language. As I say, some will dispute me vigorously on this, and say that it is sufficient to understand, for example, what M&A transac- tions are, or how complex litigation is organized
and unfolds, and that you can always get people to assist with language translation. I strongly dis- agree with that view.
When you first started practicing private international law, did you feel that most people were involved in that area of law because of their language back- ground?
Yes, I think that is true. Until “globalization” re- ally gathered pace in the 1990s, the people who practiced private international law practice were those who came to the game with a facility in French, German, Japanese or Chinese, or what have you. I think nowadays that has changed significantly, because almost every medium- to large-sized company in the United States is en- tangled in complex relationships with other na- tions (and firms in those nations) and other na- tional legal and regulatory systems. Thus, you have many examples of legal professionals who have no particular linguistic resources or cultural understanding but are thrown into transactions which involve the rest of the world. They can ap- ply their legal training and experience to the task at hand, but I think have to scramble a bit to un- derstand the foreign jurisdiction, its law, and its practices.
What should students do while in law school to prepare for a career in private international law?
I can think of two things: One is to test and ed- ucate yourself to become the best pure lawyer possible. That means challenging yourself to in- vestigate areas where you might not have a natu- ral passion, from tax law to administrative law, etc. In this way you will see if you have the tal- ent and resources to be a good practicing lawyer, regardless of how exotic (or not) the jurisdiction you practice in is. The second thing is to challenge yourself by engaging with a completely foreign legal system. I would counsel all law students to try studying a foreign legal system, as that is precisely the experience they will have upon en- countering foreign legal institutions and systems,
ILSA Quarterly » volume 20 » issue 2 » December 2011
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