Training Educators Overseas

Linda Tam ’00 has worked at Berkeley Law for much of her career — more than a decade at the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC), then returning as a legal writing professor in 2021. So it’s fitting that fellow alums sparked her latest professional adventure.

Over lunch, former EBCLC colleague Gail Silverstein ’99 suggested that Tam meet Jessica Vapnek ’91, faculty director at UC College of the Law, San Francisco’s International Development Law Center. Silverstein had traveled to Kosovo through the center and knew of Tam’s 2015 Myanmar trip to help develop experiential law programs.

The center had also received a $200,000 grant from the U.S. Embassy in Ghana for a 15-month project to build a similar exchange there with the University of Professional Studies, Accra.

“We talked and it seemed like a great fit,” Tam says. “When these opportunities came up, I jumped on them.”

In February, Tam spent a week training the university’s law faculty about experiential legal education, with a focus on the clinical realm, and supporting their development of similar programs. She also taught U.S. legal system fundamentals and legal reasoning in first-year survey classes, and attended a symposium that addressed pending anti-LGBTQ legislation in Ghana.

In May, Tam did similar work at the University of Pristina in Kosovo through an initiative funded by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.

“Each university has its own challenges and is in a different place in developing its clinical education programs,” Tam says, noting that law studies are done at the undergraduate level in Ghana, Kosovo, and many other countries. “In these places, you choose your career much earlier than in the U.S. That poses different issues too.”

To strengthen legal systems worldwide, law schools are striving to make legal education more interesting to students and more geared toward career practice.

“Experiential education is the best way to build ethical, reflective lawyers who are thoughtful about how laws and policies impact actual people,” Tam says. “Things can sound very good on paper, but when students see what problems they’re causing on the ground, that can really shift how they look at laws and practice.”

Vapnek says Tam’s overseas experience served her well in Kosovo and Ghana and that “she brings a thoughtful and nuanced cultural understanding and really connected with our counterparts there.”

Calling the faculty at both schools growth-minded and incredibly knowledgeable, Tam hopes to build these connections and provide similar help in other nations.

“Being able to step away from what I do at work on a daily basis gives me a different perspective when I come back to it,” she says. “You can see more clearly the strengths and weaknesses of our own legal system and legal education system, comparatively. It really is an opportunity for mutual learning.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw