Last year, for example, students visited with people who worked in international markets at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and the year before they met with the international legal department at Abbott Laboratories. A J.D. adviser program that promotes personal relationships between the American and foreign students also is a priority for Schlossberg, the chief caretaker of the LLM students. Within 20 minutes, Schlossberg, who attended the London School of Economics before earning a JD from Yale University, patiently and warmly answered a steady stream of questions from current and former students calling from Israel, Japan and Poland. The main purpose of the program is to provide an international body of students with an opportunity to work with leading American law professors in a course of study of their own choosing, said Schlossberg. Besides a mandatory class that introduces American law, the students are allowed to choose from an extensive selection of upper level courses that virtually guarantee they will be able to pursue their particular interests.
Students also have the option to supplement their course work with a research project.
Business law and in particular international business law are the areas that students have focused on most in recent years. They most often cite the flexibility of the course work, small classes, availability of faculty and the access to courses unavailable in their own countries. Gummaregula too was drawn to a negotiation class that was not available in India. She said she also learned a lot about herself in the class taught by Stephen B. Goldberg, a nationally known authority on alternative dispute resolution and a pioneer in the use of grievance mediation as an alternative to arbitration. A class on securities law taught by David S. Ruder, another leader in his field, also was a favorite.