Law schools in future will be much more than teachin Law.

Three years of law school may be barely enough time to squeeze in the whole of American law, but schools across the U.S. have decided that American law isn't enough. Transnational law is becoming a cornerstone of the American legal education as students take on such issues as immigration, outsourcing, and human rights violations. "Law schools are educating not just lawyers but also future world leaders," says Carl Monk, executive director of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS). "It is critically important [that they] have a better understanding of other cultures and legal systems to help countries act in an enlightened manner." AALS, in fact, held a conference on global legal education last May in Oahu, Hawaii, where 50 law professors from around the world swapped ideas for integrating transnational issues into the classroom and establishing a more globalized legal curriculum. Already at U.S. law schools students can take courses like Challenge of War to International Humanitarian Law (Harvard) and Gender Issues in Islamic Law (NYU). Students at American University's Washington College of Law can get real-world experience working with refugees at a human rights clinic. It's a new approach for a new world, says Allan Abravanel, a partner in Perkins Coie's international practice group in Portland, Oregon. When he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1971, specialized international courses were sparse. Today, most major firms count transnational practice among their specialties, and by the time Abravanel's daughter Karen graduated from Harvard in 2003, she had studied the Islamic legal system and worked on legal issues in Belfast-experience that landed her a job with New York firm Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett. Says her father: "Young lawyers are much more aware of international issues than we were thirty years ago.