“It’s one thing to have a U.S. professor teach a class about the U.K. legal system or constitution, but I find it much more impactful and insightful that our classes were taught from a true U.K. legal perspective,” says 2L McCall Phillips.

The U.K. Study Abroad program launched in 2004, and for 19 years all three weeks of the program were held exclusively in London. That changed in May 2024, when Phillips and fellow participants would spend the first two weeks of their course at Pembroke College in Oxford.

While there, they studied Comparative Legal Institutions and Comparative Constitutional Law with Farrah Raza, Ph.D, public law scholar at Pembroke College. Learning these topics overseas provided a global perspective on the rule of law, and a deeper appreciation of the U.S. legal system.

The third and final week brought students to The Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn, one of London’s four Inns of Court, where they met masters of the bench, judges and student barristers and attended dinner in Gray’s Great Hall.

“Comparative courses have the potential to open your mind to different legal cultures and forms of legal reasoning. They also encourage students to focus on the similarities and differences between different systems,” Raza says. “The students were very intellectually curious, hardworking and willing to ask difficult questions. It’s been a real pleasure working with them.”

Together, U.K. Study Abroad participants found new perspectives within and beyond their studies.

“The school did a great job of building a program that was academically focused, but left room for fun and travel,” Phillips says. “The best memories were the ones where we would meet up as a group at dinner or a pub, watch a soccer game and get to know one another even better.”