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Mark L. Jones

Publication Date

5-28-2025

Document Type

Special Contribution

Abstract

The present article is the fourth in a series of articles addressing the fundamental dimensions of law and lawyering and urging the reliberalization of U.S. legal education. It is largely an exercise in analytical jurisprudence. Parts I and II seek to provide an account of a modern legal system and legal evolution that combines and integrates my own fundamental dimensions of law taxonomy with the accounts of a legal system given by the legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart and the comparatist John Henry Merryman. The model of a modern legal system these Parts develop should be part of the cognitive equipment of all members of the U.S. legal profession. In this way, they can be sufficiently sensitive to the multiple dimensions of law they encounter in their daily work and can otherwise more effectively navigate their way around the legal system.

Part III of the article combines and integrates the account in Parts I and II with some additional analytical framework and uses the resulting expanded framework to analyze and illuminate the transnational dimensions of law, on the assumption that it is essential for members, and aspiring members, of the legal profession to become familiar with them—despite the popular, albeit facile and mistaken, belief that “globalization” is now dead or at least dying. Specifically, it analyzes and illuminates the nature and generation of transnational law at the levels of private, national, and international legal ordering, as well as the process of transnationalizing the national economic, social, and legal environments. In this way, it is intended to support the normative argument that every law school should ensure that all its students receive a basic exposure to the transnational dimensions of law as a complete set.

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