It's Not (Just) the Language: Development in a CBI Course for International Master of Laws Students

Although increased numbers of law schools are establishing and expanding Master of Laws (LL.M.) programs for legally educated individuals from other countries, few studies document any aspect of their learning in U.S. law schools ( Lazarus-Black & Globokar, 2015 ). Additionally, despite the fact that these students are already experts in one legal system and English language learners, most educational programs designed for LL.M. students work from the assumption that instruction should be identical to that provided for American J.D. students with the addition of a language component. From a Vygotskian perspective, however, instructional programs for LL.M. students may be better organized if they account for students already having expert reasoning ability in a different legal system, where legal discourse is differently constructed and differently read when compared with American common law. This article explicates a concept-based instruction (CBI) course for multilingual LL.M. students in a U.S. law school, where the salient differences between legal systems and language proficiency were accounted for. Specifically, the CBI for multilingual students program takes analogical reasoning as salient to U.S. common law reasoning and distinct from the legal systems in which the LL.M. students are trained. The article traces how material and social mediation provoke development of one student's ability to engage in legal analogical reasoning.