LL.M.
reasons to apply the proportionality test: balance the prestige of the New York bar against academic opportunities it deprives you of during school.
Speaking of the second perspective, for some the LL.M. degree is not the final point but merely a step towards future scholarly achievements. Peo- ple plan to pursue a Ph.D. or an S.J.D. degree, or to continue research and teaching on a fellow- ship basis after their LL.M. year is over. People in this category usually do not take the bar exam, and their curriculum is less constrained, but they have to put together a research proposal instead, which is comparable in terms of required effort. Prospective Ph.D.s and S.J.D.s might consider participating in a writing workshop, or taking a course in legal writing to facilitate the work on their scholarly projects. We used our LL.M. year to develop our ongoing Ph.D. projects that had been started earlier at Moscow State University. Not surprisingly, in the course of writing our 50- page LL.M. Long Papers we almost completely changed our focus and revised our methodolo- gies. What started as an attempt to complement previous research with new materials ended up as re-thinking and revision of the very basic ideas underlying our projects.
The third category is the lucky ones who do not have to sit for the bar or write a thesis proposal because they believe their future is already under control. As we explained above, this often proves to be an illusion. But even if the future is not un- der control at all, this third perspective should – to some extent – be shared by every LL.M. student. You can do a parody show, travel around (if you can get affordable airfares) or learn squash. Dur- ing our year in the U.S. we were able to sit as judges at two moot court competitions, including the Jessup, to attend the ILSA International Law Weekend in New York, and to present Russian food of Aleksandra’s making at the exciting LL.M. International Party at Harvard. There is no reason why the three perspectives on the contents of an LL.M. year should be mutually exclusive.
LL.M. Ideologies: National vs. International
LL.M. programs differ depending on how “cos- mopolitan” they are. The two endpoints are pro- grams with an exclusively national focus and pro- grams of transnational character. In the former case a foreign student has to integrate into the student body comprised mostly of people from the host country. In the latter case there is no bulk of students for whom a school or a coun- try is a home, and sometimes the faculty is also multi-national. In most cases, however, an LL.M. program is a combination of the two approaches. On the one hand, it is unlikely that you will find yourself the only foreigner in an LL.M. program, at least not in the U.K. or the U.S. On the other hand, most law schools are nationally embedded and thus have the “native” core of students and faculty (one exception we know is the Center for Transnational Legal Studies where we studied on a semester-long certificate program in transna- tional law in 2010).
The level of “internationalization” varies mostly in terms of the academic component: there are schools that “segregate” LL.M. students and cre- ate courses specifically aimed at international stu- dents, while others allow LL.M.s to be enrolled in all available courses. In the latter case, it is much more likely that the bulk of your classmates will be “natives” and a course will be oriented to- wards them. This is a good thing if you want, for example, to study U.S. corporate law in greater detail, but it might be a disaster if you enroll into a course called “Conflict of Laws” only to discover later that you have subscribed to study conflict of laws between the states of the U.S. rather than private international law.
If you are an international student, taking a course on some aspect of national law is not necessarily superfluous. It might well be that such a course offers insights into comparable international phe- nomena. For example, Grigory’s mandatory core U.S. course on Constitutional Law: First Amend- ment offered him an opportunity to compare U.S.
ILSA Quarterly » volume 22 » issue 3 » February 2014 31
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