With ~40 new ECUPL LL.B. students joining LEALS this month, I have enjoyed reading the responses to my usual pre-course questionnaire. Especially these two questions, considering all the headlines about visas and higher education more generally.

I think it’s fair to say that ECUPL is the most important law school for the global business of LL.M. programs (metrics I use: school size, student interest in study abroad, capacity and interest to pay for programs that are supposed to make money). I’ll have much more on this on the Beyond Non-JD | by Joshua Alter blog in the coming weeks.

Some things I’ll pay attention to?

• This year, my LEALS course is compulsory for a subset of students. In past years, it was a course students registered for. So I was already likely facing more changes from past years, where self-selection likely led to more interest in the United States.
• More of my students have asked me for LORs for schools outside the U.S. over recent years. Since LEALS started in 2015, I’ve had students study in other jurisdictions. So I’m not sure how much is a shift and how much is students just feeling more comfortable asking me. Put another way, the question whether some past students “worried” that I’d be disappointed in them if they told me they didn’t want to study in the U.S. after my course versus more shifting away from the U.S. more generally.
• How the messaging from the Trump administration plays into future plans. Most of my students have not yet committed to study abroad anywhere, let alone in the United States. I generally have a lot of second and third-year LL.B. students and even soon-to-be fourth year LL.B. students whose cycles haven’t started. Will the messaging, apart from the actual legal process, end the U.S. dreams for any students before they even start to weigh the U.S. v. England v. Singapore v. Hong Kong options, as well as programs in other jurisdictions.

For my former ECUPL students: reach out if you’d like to mentor Summer 2025 students, share advice from your own global options and decisions, and help ensure that ECUPL LEALSers have great head starts for their post-LL.B. careers.