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Opening the Door and Bringing the Students In

Teaching a class on Foreign, Comparative and International Legal (FCIL) research makes complete sense in Tucson, Arizona. The city of Tucson is located an hour away from a major international border which is constantly featured in local, national and international news. The proximity to the US-Mexico Border makes the University of Arizona College of Law, the ideal place from where to study and analyze other national legal systems, how to compare them and the impact of international law and transnational emergencies. These are some of the themes students engage with in my class, among many others. However, I also strive to meet them where they are and not where I’d like them to be. As a professor, it’s important to take off the expert hat and try to design a flexible and clear path for students to learn, to explore and to realize how much they are achieving in class.

To illustrate this, allow me to give you an example. The first day of class, I assign each student a country from the following ones: Dominican Republic, Suriname, Senegal, South Korea, Peru, Thailand, Honduras, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Estonia, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Fiji, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Angola. These countries are from different parts of the world, non-English speaking and with either a hybrid or a non-common law legal system. This is a purposeful choice in order to prepare students for several classes on different legal systems, translation and regional/international organizations. Beyond the practicalities of choosing these countries, I intentionally want the students to feel a little lost and uncomfortable as they face the seemingly daunting task of doing foreign and comparative legal research on countries that for the most part, they have never heard of or never worked on before.

In order to capture these feelings and for me to learn where the students are coming from, that very first day of class, I also ask them to fill out the first two questions of the image below: 1) First reactions on ____; and 2) What challenges are you expecting as you pursue legal research on ____? I usually give them a few minutes in class to think about and write down the answers to these questions. Then, I ask every student to read out loud their answers and share with the entire group. As you can see from the example below, the students come back to this exercise at the end of the seven-week course. At that moment, they have to answer the last two questions: 1) After 7 weeks, how do you feel about conducting legal research on ___; and 2) What is the most important thing you have learned? Again, the students are asked to share their final answers with the entire class. Also, I showcase their answers and work on the walls of my library office for everyone to see, without identifying the students’ names.

What Have I Learned From Assigning This Exercise?

The students always surprise you. You can prepare, rehearse and anticipate your students’ questions, concerns and even answers or lack thereof. However, there is always an element of unpredictability which you learn to deal with. In my experience so far, the unpredictable reaction from students has been insightful and exciting. The students bring their knowledge to class and inevitably they make connections between the information you’re conveying and what seems familiar to them. As a professor, these connections the students make may be both challenging and an opportunity to engage with them in a more meaningful and direct way. How you take whatever they bring to class and incorporate it in class makes your material more digestible and easy to grasp/follow. I believe those moments can also be an opportunity to precisely meet students where they are, and not where I’d like them to be.

Being the Foreign, Comparative and International Law Librarian in the law library team or having this expertise in any professional setting can be a lonely endeavor. Most of the time, you are the only person in your team that has this expertise or interest and others just come to you when the work demands it. Therefore, teaching this class and meeting students interested in this topic has been eye-opening and rewarding. Some students come to my class with specific needs and expect to learn tools which will help them solve whatever concrete challenges they already have. The perfect example is those that attend my class because they’re writing their substantive papers on topics related to international or comparative law. This is a specific need which we address in my class and at the end they have the tools they need to address this particular work.

However, I promote my class to all students wanting to learn how to craft a research strategy, how to understand different legal taxonomies, how to effectively work with keywords, how to evaluate information, etc. These skills are fundamental to any legal researcher and/or lawyer, especially given the transformations led by generative AI and big data in our profession. Whether the tool you’re working with hallucinates or not, there is always a need to take legal research seriously. What is the source of your data? Who is the authority? Historical vs. current legal data? and evaluating information are just a handful of questions and issues which have always been part of this work and they will continue to be even after the AI boom settles in.

And in order to achieve this and more, I believe we need to ask students where they are and where they are coming from. Their honest answers might be the door for meaningful and productive conversations and set the stage for larger and more complex conversations, which the students will be involved in.

I leave you with my students’ answers to the exercise. (Click on the link or image below to read their submissions.)

Comments

  1. What you’re teaching is both refreshing and important in an increasingly connected world. As much as we have an abundance of information; knowledge appears to be elusive for many. Thank you for sharing.

  2. Creating a welcoming and engaging environment for students to generate their own ideas and deepen their understanding of FCIL is a great challenge for any educator. Thank you, Marcelo, for sharing your teaching experience and revealing results in your students’ submissions.