Research Handbook on Global Legal Education (Elgar 2026)

Research Handbooks in Legal Education and the Legal Profession

Edited by Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen, University of California Irvine School of Law and Bryant G. Garth, American Bar Foundation, USA

Publication Date: August 2026

This Research Handbook examines legal training and its impact on law and society. Leading experts adopt a kaleidoscope perspective to compare diverse country case studies, highlighting shifting patterns rather than a single model of ‘global’ legal education.

A fuller publisher’s description:

This authoritative Research Handbook examines legal training and its impact on law and society. Leading experts adopt a kaleidoscope perspective to compare diverse country case studies, highlighting shifting patterns rather than a single model of ‘global’ legal education.

Contributors explore how legal education remains nationalised via local histories, politics and markets, despite borrowing models and language from modern, merit-based, or global approaches. Chapters assess the appearance of law schools as powerful sites where divisions of class, race, gender, empire and prestige are reproduced, contested and sometimes reimagined. The Research Handbook demonstrates how familiar patterns of hierarchies, inequalities and Western-centric ideals travel widely alongside diverse efforts in majority world contexts to resist, revisit and reimagine fairer institutions. Combining doctrinal analysis, institutional histories, archives, interviews and fieldwork, this Research Handbook advances research and promotes further study.

The Research Handbook is a crucial resource for legal education scholars and practitioners and also global scholars of the legal profession. It is prime reading for students and scholars of law and society and comparative institutions seeking more information on the factors shaping the legal landscape today.