Podcast features legal ed collab in 13 countries

On October 1, colleagues and I will start a new eight-week run of the Global Law Classroom (GLC), and program leader Professor Melanie Reid has published a GLC podcast.

The GLC uses Zoom to bring together students and faculty around the world to study issues in international and comparative law. Students work in geographically diverse breakout groups, so get to know their counterparts from other countries. I've wrote here at The Savory Tort about the GLC in 2024, and colleagues and I discussed the project at Global Legal Skills conference in Brno, Czechia, in May 2025.

Professor Reid, at the Duncan School of Law, Lincoln Memorial University, conceived of the GLC when Zoom became instrumental to legal education in the pandemic, and has led the initiative since. This year, Professor Reid recorded a podcast to go along with the GLC, Beyond the Global Law Classroom. The podcast comprises 22 episodes, each an interview with a GLC faculty member to learn more about the perspective from that person's legal system and personal experience.

Professor Reid kindly featured me and The Savory Tort in episode 14. 

This year's GLC will welcome students and faculty from China, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Lithuania, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey, besides the United States. My Comparative Law class will participate from Massachusetts. 

Our subject-matter units include global lawyering, environmental law, human rights, criminal law, security and energy law, artificial intelligence, and negotiation. For the faculty, I have served as coordinator of the environmental law team, and as a member of the human rights team, developing curriculum for those units.

Global Law Classroom unites law students online

Law faculty around the world are organizing the Global Law Classroom to debut in the fall semester of 2024.

Global Law Classroom (GLC) brings together law students from participating countries via Zoom to study and discuss contemporary issues in comparative and international law. GLC started as a project of the European Legal Practice Integrated Studies program (ELPIS), under the EU Erasmus umbrella. 

The program was conceived and is coordinated by Melanie Reid, associate dean of faculty at the Duncan School of Law, Lincoln Memorial University. I've participated on the plenary faculty and as contributing faculty on the environmental law team and human rights team, developing academic modules in those areas. My students in three-credit-hour Comparative Law in the fall will participate in the GLC for one-third of their class-hours.

Besides human rights and environmental law, modules include criminal law, cybersecurity, anti-discrimination, and artificial intelligence, as well as an introduction to global lawyering and a negotiation exercise on climate risks.