The internationalisation of Dutch legal education: Seeking a balance between local requirements, European exigencies and international perspectives

With the development of nation states, legal education has become a national business: linked to the national legal system and the national language. Legal education served national legal professions. This focus, as well as the control which national legal professions have on legal education, must be reconciled with europeanisation and globalisation. How can and must legal education be transformed so as to cater for all legal needs of society: local, european and global? in this chapter, the author describes the development and evolution of dutch legal education in this light. Law schools in the netherlands steer between localism and globalization, seeking to educate a variety of lawyers for a variety of jobs, in a wide variety of settings. The local law firm, specialized in labor and welfare law; the niche boutique law firms and the major big law firms with international clients and english as an important language, as well as policy advisors, civil servants on the local, national, european and international level. Challenging indeed, but very worthwhile, because these new perspectives went hand in hand with opening up law schools for international staff, students and competition, increasing quality, and also allowed for new avenues of new comparative and international research.