Yet More Evidence of IL’s Mainstreaming

This from Harvard’s Einer Elhauge, guest-blogging over at VC. Elhauge describes his new casebook, Global Antitrust Law & Economics:

We put US regulations and cases side by side with the EC regulations and cases that regulate the same conduct on global markets, without suggesting that one of them is more important or necessary to understanding basic antitrust law and that the other is only useful to add perspective. We designed the book to be able to replace parochial books on basic antitrust law and teach antitrust lawyers the global landscape they must face, not to merely provide grist for advanced courses in comparative and international antitrust.

I think this is the first casebook to go this far, but glancing through advertising for other casebooks, it seems clear that casebooks in every area are popping up which add an increasing amount of global content to basic legal subjects. My prediction is our book will just be the leading edge of a wave of such books, and that they will transform legal education more than anything else we have seen in the last few decades. Perhaps we will even get to the stage where we do not need courses in comparative and international law because each substantive course already addresses the comparison and how to resolve international conflicts in that subject.

He goes on to put the insinuation of international and comparative law on the same track as the earlier rise of law and economics in the legal academy. No disagreement from these quarters.