By Dan FletcherThe Daily Northwestern
Lawyers and professionals in Tel Aviv, Israel, can now earn a master of laws degree awarded in part by Northwestern’s School of Law.
The program, which began Feb. 25, offers the 38 students currently enrolled a dual degree in public law and international law, said Janet Garesche, director of the executive master of laws program. The degree will be awarded both from the NU School of Law and Tel Aviv University’s Buchmann Faculty of Law. Professors from NU will travel to Tel Aviv and teach at Tel Aviv University.
David Van Zandt, dean of the Law School, said the program is a way for the school to expand its reach to students who couldn’t attend classes in Chicago.
“The idea with the executive program is that there are students that are too far along in their careers (who) can’t just pick up and go to the United States and do a program for a year or so,” he said.
Van Zandt said sending faculty abroad can help the university as well as overseas students.
“It’s a real benefit for faculty who go and teach in a different style (to) a different set of students,” he said. “They learn a lot while doing the teaching so they can come back to a classroom here and bring a more international focus to what they do.”
This is the third executive program that the Law School has opened, with similar offerings in Seoul, South Korea, and Madrid, Spain. The Tel Aviv program is unique in the classes offered, Van Zandt said.
“This is a little different than the other two because the focus is on public law and constitutional law, so the students are a little different,” he said.
Prof. Mayer Freed, associate dean for academic affairs, said the students come from a different background than those in the other programs.
“It’s a program that’s addressed to an audience that’s not one that we’ve addressed our other programs to, which was a business audience,” he said. “This program has a group of people that have significant impact over the development of public life in Israel.”
Garesche said Tel Aviv is the largest program to date in terms of enrollment.
“I always said Tel Aviv would be our sleeper program … But it’s impossible to point to one single thing as the cause,” she said, adding that much of the marketing was done in Hebrew by Tel Aviv University.
The early success of the program means the Law School will continue to look for opportunities to expand abroad, Van Zandt said.
“We think that legal services in the world are globalizing,” he said. “We want to reach out and be more global ourselves, and part of that is by offering what we do – which is some very strong basic Anglo-American law training and law in business – and offering that to students around the world.”
He said the Law School has been in discussions with the Chinese government for some time now, and he recently took his first trip to India in part to study the feasibility of a program there.
But Garesche said she didn’t believe any additional programs would start soon.
“It took MTV 20 years to get into China, and they have unlimited resources,” she said. “It’s a lot more difficult for us.”
Reach Dan Fletcher at [email protected].
