The Shepard Broad Law Center introduced the new Global Law Leadership Initiative, an elective track law students can start in June 2016.
Dean Jon Garon said the track is a group of elective courses students can take that are founded on legal education, business education, technology and international business practice.
The track begins with an immersive three-course summer semester, which Garon said is unique to legal education.
“There’s been a couple of experiments, but this is the first eight-credit summer immersion program like it in the country,” Garon said.
Students will be able to choose how much of the program they want as there are multiple courses in each discipline. Garon said this helps students plan their curriculum more effectively; they can decide which courses to take based on their interests.
The goal of the program is to help students become more successful in their careers. For example, Garon said, students who take the courses on international business practices learn about immigration, international human rights and comparative law to understand the role of the U.S. legal system and help clients navigate from the U.S. legal system to a non-U.S. legal system.
“I’m a firm believer that legal education really is the kind of education that will allow someone to have the most successful career over the most decades in their lives,” Garon said. “But we need to make sure that our students have the entry-level skills that cut across disciplines, so our programs will allow students to be successful lawyers and also have that MBA and technology acumen necessary to enter the job market across disciplines.”
The track will also help students be more adept at working with future clients.
“They’ll understand the pragmatic needs of the people they’re working with,” Garon said. “They’ll have the analytical skills, as well as the leadership and management skills, to identify the core issues of their clients and how to identify the most effective solutions as quickly as possible.”
Garon said law schools haven’t traditionally provided this kind of education to their students, as students typically received mentoring in these areas at firms. Now, the firms have changed and are unable to provide that kind of mentoring.
“More and more students are going into corporate and governmental work than just traditional law firms, so they really need to get this kind of education from the law school, and the sooner we can provide it to them, the more effective they are in their clerkships and throughout law school as well,” Garon said.
Though the curriculum is from the law school, Garon said they are working with the H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship and the Graduate School of Computer Sciences and Information to develop it.
“The program highlights the curricular partnership between the business school, the law school and computer science school,” Garon said. “It really shows that our programs are inherently interdisciplinary, and that’s one of the great strengths of NSU as a university.”
Garon also said the track is immersive in that students will work in simulations to learn how to apply what they learned in class.
“If you work through these groupings of courses, it’ll provide a much more rounded set of elective courses and enable the students to be much more engaged with the business and practice of the profession,” Garon said.
The program is open to any law student who is interested in participating. Though there are no plans to include other disciplines, Garon said the program may expand over time to include opportunities for working professionals and those seeking post-law school education.
To learn more about the law center, visit nsulaw.nova.edu.
