LL.M.
where he or she currently teaches (It should be noted that professors like to travel, and you may find a tenured Harvard professor teaching at Co- lumbia next year). For sure, this strategy – choos- ing a law school for its faculty members – is a risky one, primarily because of the said rule that good scholars are not always the best teachers. It might be very disappointing to discover that professor X, who writes absolutely stunning articles, is unable even to reproduce them in class and makes you read and restate ancient cases instead. But on the other hand, if you happen to come across a true mentor, this relationship will definitely make your LL.M. year. It is not only about academic learning: when your professor invites you for a Thanksgiv- ing dinner with his family or holds a course ses- sion in his house to show you his art collection, you learn no less than in class.
LL.M. Lifestyle: Academic Enclave vs. School and the City
Obviously, location matters. We know people who have consciously declined to apply to Yale be- cause they could not imagine themselves stuck in a small town of New Haven. On the other hand, we have ourselves tremendously enjoyed our year at Harvard in a large part because it has been a great change to live in small and quiet Cambridge, Massachusetts, after overcrowded busy Moscow. But irrespective of whether you move from one big city to another or land in a remote town, an LL.M. program is a lifestyle change. You do not have to do anything but study – no permanent job (if you are a foreign student in the U.S., you can only work a few hours per week on campus), re- duced family responsibilities, and a pool of new acquaintances. But transition both into this differ- ent lifestyle and out of it may be hard.
From our personal viewpoint, living in Cambridge was just a perfect way of living a student life, with kayaking on the Charles River, biking, and no need to commute whatsoever. These little details were themselves already worth filling out lengthy LL.M.
ILSA Quarterly » volume 22 » issue 3 » February 2014
applications and collecting references. It might be that at the start of the admissions process you have no clear idea about why you want to do a master’s, apart from a desire to live abroad for a while. We can assure you that many, if not most, LL.M. students had that feeling at some point. But after going through it we can hardly think of anything about an LL.M. that hurts. You either learn more, or get new happy memories, or both. So go for it and treasure every moment of this unique experience.
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* Aleksandra Ivlieva and Grigory Vaypan are Ph.D. students at Moscow State University (Russia). They both obtained their first law degrees from Moscow State University in 2011 and their LL.M. degrees from Harvard Law School in 2013. They were also part of the Moscow State University team that claimed the title of Jessup World Cham- pion in 2012.
.
Advance your career with an LL.M. from Temple.
Learn U.S. Law in the birthplace of the United States with our LL.M. for Foreign Trained Lawyers.
Go global in our LL.M. in Transnational Law at our Philadelphia, Rome or Tokyo campuses.
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